Unix Tools 2003-04
Principal lecturer: Dr Markus Kuhn
Taken by: Part IB
Syllabus
This non-examinable 6-h lecture course takes you onto a quick tour
through a few important and highly useful Unix development tools
including the shell, make, Perl and LaTeX on 2003 October 9-28,
12:00-13:00 in the Heycock Lecture
Theatre, New Museums Site.
Study Materials (in PDF for
easy printing):
Related links:
- Single UNIX
Specification (Shell
Command Language, Utility
Conventions, sh,
make)
- GNU Tools Source Code:
bash,
sh-utils,
textutils,
make,
rcs,
cvs
- CVS Manual
- Csh
Programming Considered Harmful, a periodic posting by Tom
Christiansen to comp.unix.shell
- Related FAQs
- Comprehensive Perl
Archive Network (CPAN), Perl.com, Perl Mongers
- TeX Users Group, The UK TeX Archive
Most of the tools discussed in the course can be explored and used
on the PWF
Linux installations in the Computer Laboratory's Teaching Lab.
However, due to home directories residing on a Novell server, PWF
Linux has a few quirks and
restrictions compared to a typical Unix or Linux system. Problems
with PWF Linux should be reported to
pwf-linux@ucs.cam.ac.uk.
I'd like to encourage students who own a PC and are interested in
Unix to try out one of the various excellent freely or cheaply
available Unix-like operating systems: Linux (Debian, Mandrake, SuSE, RedHat), NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. In particular, the
Computing Service's Unix
Support runs an FTP
and NFS
server with all the files and updates found on the latest Red Hat
installation CDs.
To get started with installing Red Hat 9:
- Read the Installation
Guide.
- Make sure you have space for a generous new harddisk partition
(perhaps after resizing a too large existing partition with FIPS).
- One option to proceed is to burn yourself copies of the the
installation CDs from the provided ISO
9660 images and install from these.
- More conveniently, for those who enjoy a fast Internet connection
in a college room, it is only necessary to prepare a boot
CD-R or boot
floppy disk. The necessary files are here.
Then the installation software booted this way can be told to load the
rest of the operating system from the Computing Service's NFS server,
as described in the linked documentation.
Alternatively, you can buy boxed sets with nice printed manuals in
various computer stores in town (e.g., SuSE Linux 9.0 for £35). As of
December 2003, the University of Cambridge Computing Service Unix Support also runs a local SuSE Linux
ftp mirror, which can be NFS mounted from the server
nfs-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk under the directory
/linux/suse.
Feedback on the course would be
appreciated.
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