Nevis Software Guide

In addition to the notes below and in linked web pages, you should also look at the latest nevis-linux announcements for descriptions of new software and the latest versions.

UNIX software at Nevis can be generally grouped into these categories:

UNIX system commands

These are programs that are part of almost any UNIX system installation. To get information about a UNIX command, use man For example, to get information about the grep command, type man grep.

If you want to learn about the UNIX operating system and its commands:

• UNIX Tutorial For Beginners
• Learn UNIX

Utilities

The GNU Consortium is the standard source for free UNIX utility software, including the utilities available in Linux. An important GNU utility is the emacs editor. To get information about most GNU utilities, you can use the info facility which is easily available from within emacs.

The steps involved to see the GNU documentation are:

• type emacs to invoke the editor
• (if this is your first time using emacs)learn the basic navigation commands by typing C-h t <-- this means to hold down the "Ctrl" key, type "h", let go of the "Ctrl" key, and type "t".
• invoke info by typing C-h i.

Note: I know that emacs is not as popular a UNIX text editor as vim or nano. However, the emacs keyboard commands also work on the shell command line. I therefore recommend emacs as the most powerful of these three (at the cost of complexity) because emacs skills equate to shell skills.

Physics and research-related software

• There are programs that are not necessarily part of a standard Linux installation, including Geant4, ROOT, LaTeX.

Symbolic Math programs

You can use symbolic math programs via our notebook server. If you're looking specifically for Mathematica, Matlab, or Maple, please see this page.

Electronic Mail

E-mail is such an important tool for a research scientist that it has been given a section all its own.