Introduction to Unix Part 1 Research Computing Workshops 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: - to run Computational CHEM and STAT apps - more disk space than on your PC’s - run one calculation for several days - for calculations too big for your PC or MAC Student programming assignments may be completed on MCSR/UM systems Distributions of Linux • • • • • • • • • 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 jsu tracct1 tracct2 r1311 Unix/Linux File System Similar to MS/DOS Files (Windows Command Prompt): Differences Windows Case doesn’t matter Spaces ok in filenames Backslash used in pathnames User “Administrator” Linux Case sensitive Spaces not OK in names Forward slash in paths User “root” Unix/Linux File Permissions Unix/Linux File Permissions