Getting around Linux

Tutorials for the complete newbie

There are many tutorials out there. Google is your friend.

Setting your path

To use software installed on your machine, you may need to set your path.

Linux command reference materials

There are many reference guides out there. Google is your friend.

Remote editing with TRAMP

TRAMP lets you use a local Emacs to edit a remote file. Note that the Tramp syntax seems to vary between the different versions of Emacs.

Public key authentication with SSH

SSH lets you use public key authentication instead of password authentication. Among other good things, this lets you run parallel jobs without typing your password for each process. If you do any parallel computing, or if you're just plain lazy (an admirable character trait in a computational scientist) you'll want to set up PK for SSH. There are many ssh tutorials on the Interwebs. Here's a detailed tutorial with troubleshooting notes.
Last modified: Wed Sep 8 23:46:38 CDT 2010