Introduction to Unix
Part 1
Research Computing Workshops
Fall 2008
Office of Information Technology
&
Mississippi Center for
Supercomputing Research
Jason Hale & Susan Lukose
Unix is an Operating System
An O/S manages access to the resources of a computer.
O/S host applications, shielding
them from the hardware.
Other popular operating systems:
Windows XP, Windows Vista,
MAC OS X
Unix looks more like DOS
than Windows
Common Flavors of Unix
IBM’s AIX
Hewlett Packard’s HP-UX.
Sun’s Solaris
SGI’s IRIX
Apple’s MAC OS X
Unix Variants: Linux, BSD, …
Why Learn Unix/Linux?
Unix/Linux commonly used on computer “servers”:
Web servers
Database servers
Supercomputers/Clusters
Over 50% of servers in corporations run Unix or Linux
A little Unix experience goes a long way, on the job,
and looking for a job
Why Learn Unix/Linux?
At UM/MCSR:
SAS is installed on UM’s Research Server: willow
- more disk space than on your PC’s
- run one calculation for several days
Matlab is installed on willow.
Mathematica on mimosa cluster
for calculations too big for your PC or MAC
Student programming assignments may be
completed on MCSR/UM systems
Distributions of Linux
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Fedora
SUSE Linux Enterprise
openSUSE
Debian GNU/Linux
Ubuntu
Mandriva Linux
Slackware Linux
Gentoo
Components of Unix
Shells
Commands
System
Utilities
End-User
Utilities
Kernel
Shells
Docs
Development
tools
MCSR Unix Workshops Will Cover:
Shells
Commands
System
Utilities
End-User
Utilities
Kernel
Shells
Docs
Development
tools