The machine stuwww.uvt.nl is available for making the assignments for this class. If you do not yet have an account on this machine, you will need to apply for one by filling in the online form:
Application form for stuwww account
After you have accepted their terms by pressing Ik ga akkoord met deze voorwaarden, you need to fill in your ANR and associated password. This should get you to a page where you can fill in your choice for the password for the new stuwww account.
If the procedure is successful, you should receive an e-mail with the name of the account on your UvT mail address within minutes.
You can connect to stuwww with the command PuTTY. This command can be found in the Start Menu. Instructions for establishing the connection:
If this set of instructions does not work for you then please ask for help.
You can also connect to the stuwww machine from a home computer with Internet access. If you have a Windows machine at home then you can use PuTTY and the list of instructions mentioned above. If your computer does not have PuTTY then you need to download and install it.
Download PuTTY from stuwww
In case you have a Mac or a Linux machine at home then you can connect to stuwww by opening a terminal window and typing ssh NAME@stuwww.uvt.nl in the window where "NAME" is your stuwww login
On stuwww, you will have a command line interface. By typing in commands, you can check the status of the machine and start programs. One useful command is ls -l which can be used for checking the contents of the current directory:
erikt@stuwww:~$ ls -l total 12 drwxrwx--- 2 erikt httpd 4096 2007-09-04 21:55 html drwx------ 2 root root 4096 2007-09-04 21:55 mail -rw------- 1 root root 1687 2007-09-04 21:55 README
The names of the files and directories appear in the right column. The only interesting object in this directory is html, a directory which can be used for storing a home page.
We will start with creating a directory for our Perl files and jump to this directory:
erikt@stuwww:~$ mkdir perl erikt@stuwww:~$ cd perl erikt@stuwww:~/perl$ ls -l total 0
The directory is empty. Let's start with creating a file with a simple Perl program. We create the file with the editor emacs, a program which can be used for changing text files. The most important command in emacs is the command used to leave the program: Ctrl-x Ctrl-c, which are two combinations of two keys: first the control key together with the x and then the control key and the x. Start emacs in the window:
erikt@stuwww:~/perl$ emacs test.pl
Then type line print "Hello world!\n"; in the editor and exit the editor with Ctrl-x Ctrl-c (answer y when it asks for saving the file). Now you have a file with a Perl program in the current directory. You can run this program with the command perl:
erikt@stuwww:~/perl$ ls -l total 4 -rw-r--r-- 1 erikt wwwppl 25 2007-09-05 14:30 test.pl erikt@stuwww:~/perl$ perl test.pl Hello world!
The program performs its task: it prints the line Hello world!
Now you can start with the first exercise.
If you want to know more about the commands that are available in the command line window then check out Joshua Go's Introduction to Linux guide, the short emacs tutorial or ask the teachers, either in class or by sending mail to erikt(at)science.uva.nl