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| Hello,
and welcome to the Departments of Physics and Astronomy! This is a
brief overview of where to find help and how to start using the
Department of Physics and Astronomy facilities. General Information: All of the departments in the Physics and Astronomy building use a mix of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X desktops. Graduate students in Physics and Astronomy use Linux desktops when the first arrive. Linux, if you haven't already heard, is a free Unix based operating system. Wikipedia has a fairly good discourse on it. For all help requests, send email to help@phys.washington.edu. We track requests using the Request Tracker system so we can centralize support. At the beginning of the school year we expect to respond more slowly due to the volume of requests, so be patient when looking for answers. Also note that we work on a rotating schedule, so respect your favorite system administrator and only visit them during their scheduled hours. See the front page of the PACS site for a current schedule and who's on duty. For immediate help with Linux, ask another more seasoned graduate student or do a google search for help. In addition Linux comes with a significant amount of documentation embedded in the commands you type in a "Terminal" window. Type "man" and the name of a command. Often, typing the command followed by a -h or --help will also give you information. If you're interested in learning more here are a few books, websites, and technologies you may be interested in or use in the near future: Perl: The swiss army knife of scripting languages is Perl. http://www.perl.org "Programming Perl (3rd Edition)", by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant Python: The leatherman tool of scripting languages is Python. http://www.python.org "Python Essential Reference (3rd Edition)", by David M. Beazley LaTeX: LaTeX is the scientific document formatting language of choice here in Physics. http://www.latex-project.org/ "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System (2nd Edition)", by Leslie Lamport Condor: Condor is a framework that allows you to run jobs on multiple machines in the department. Joaquin Drut has assembled a nice page on our Condor installation. http://www.phys.washington.edu/groups/condor/ Astronomy: Most of the information for Astronomy's systems is available on the Astronomy website. Head to http://www.astro.washington.edu/dept/ComputingResourcesNew.html Physics: Physics has a bunch of information on this website for users. I recommend purusing the Info section of our site. Over the next few months PACS and some of the grads will develop additional information for this site. |
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at phys dot washington dot edu "Are you ready for the Summer of Love and Research?" |