In order to prepare for the Computational Physics Lab sessions, you will need to be able to use your thinkpads to communicate with the University's SP2computer and to accept graphical output on your machine.

The communcation software is SSH and the graphics software is an old (free) version of X-Win32. If these are not already installed on your machines, your instructor will help you to install them on your machine. For using SSH, you can follow these steps. It will probably be installed with the full path "C:\Program Files\SSH Communications Security\SSH Secure Shell\SshClient.exe". The icon looks like this:

After running the program, you will see the screen:

By clicking on the "settings" entry in the Edit menu, you will need to set the "tunnel" attribute as shown below:

You can now use the icon "Quick connect" to login to wfu.edu using your wfu user ID.

After typing your password, you should then see the screen:

or something similar. You are now communicating directly to wfu.edu within its unix operating system. We will be using this communication port for the running the computer software. If you are not able to login to wfu.edu, please let me know. If you are able to login, and have never used this unix box, follow the following 3 steps. Type the following in your SSH window:

   cp ~natalie/www-home/s05phy346/.login .
   cp ~natalie/www-home/s05phy346/.tcshrc .
   source .login
   source .tcshrc

In the above, the "." IS IMPORTANT. If you already have used your unix account, you may wish to modify your shell, and .login and .tchsrc files, but it may not be necessary. For now, you can exit the SSH session by typing "exit" or control-D.