Exercise 1: Initial setup.

   

This introduction has one main purposes; namely to setup the working environment for the following exercises. We expected you already have a basic user knowledge needed for the daily work in a Linux environment. The current page is therefore only indented to fine tune your working environment to be able to do the exercise in this course with as little technical problems as possible.

Contents of this Introduction, with time estimates:

Subsection

 approx time
Basic background questions

10 min
Setting up the exercise environment

60 min

Basic background

[about 10 minutes]

As the background knowledge of students changes each year, it is very valuable for us to have an idea about your general computing skills. This allows us to change the content of this course on the fly, avoiding, to some extent, to replicate subjects you are already familiar with. The following questionnaire provides us with the information we need for this purpose. Please answer all questions before submitting the form.


What"s your main line of study?
Astrophysics  
Geophysics  
Nanophysics  
Subatomic  
Theoretical  
Experimental  
eScience  
other  
Credits: 1/1
Which operating systems do you feel you know reasonably well ?
Linux  
Mac  
Windows  
None  
Credits: 1/1
How do you rate yourself as a computer user on a scale from 1-5 (1=newbee, 3=average, 5=expert)? 1
2
3
4
5 		Credits: 1/1
Which of the following programming languages do you feel confident with?
Fortran  
C/C++  
Java  
PhP  
Python  
Other  
None  
Credits: 1/1
Which of the following program packages do you know well?
IDL  
Maple  
Mathematica  
SAS  
Matlab  
None  
Credits: 1/1
Do you have a PC at home? yes
no 		Credits: 1/1
Do you have a laptop? yes
no 		Credits: 1/1
Which operating system do you use mostly? Linux
Mac
Windows 		Credits: 1/1

Exercise environment

[about 60 minutes]

Accessing the exercise web material

The Computer Physics exercises are described on web pages such as the one you are reading now. Questions and hints are often present as web forms or HTML links in the exercise material (using the scripting language PHP). In general you get points (positive or negative) for answering the questions, according to certain scoring rules, but today the scores are there mostly to just register your presence and preferences.

PRINTING:
During the Exercise you may want to have a hard copy of the these instructions at hand, as a complement to the on-line hypertext display. If so, print a hard copy from your browser. Note, however, that the pages often are updated, so you should not rely entirely on the hard copy.
NOTE:
Please check that your browsers print preferences has paper size A4 set.

Setting up a working environment

Choose a place to work. This can be either one of the workstations in the data bar, or your own laptop if you brought it (if you didn't bring it now but plan to do it later then start out with a workstation -- you can switch to your laptop later).

In addition to a web browser you need the following tools on your chosen place of work:

Follow the instructions in the Course Material pages on the web for details about how to do this. Ask the teacher or teacher assistant if in doubt.

Creating a directory structure for your Computer Physics files

We are going to keep all files related to Computer Physics in a directory structure ComputerPhysics, which is made available and is kept up-to-date via CVS (Concurrent Versioning System). To create this hierarchy on your NBI login host, PC or laptop (in the following referred to as localhost) give the following commands in a command window (the colored prompt is there to remind you about where to execute this -- details differ from what you will see on the screen).

To avoid having to type the commands, you may want to use copy and paste from the web browser to the terminal window. 

localhost> cd
localhost> export CVSROOT=':pserver:bozack@comp.astro.ku.dk:/usr/local/cvs/comp-phys'       (with bash shell)
localhost> setenv CVSROOT ':pserver:bozack@comp.astro.ku.dk:/usr/local/cvs/comp-phys'       (with tcsh shell)
localhost> cvs login [ When prompted for a password, give your web exercise password ]
localhost> cvs checkout ComputerPhysics

If there are problems, try again, making sure that the commands are exactly as shown. If you continue to have problems contact your exercise teacher.

Have you checked out ComputerPhysics from CVS? no
yes
HELP! 		Credits: 1/0
OK


Home Work

[about 2 hours]

Get used to the thought of spending a couple of hours of home work on this course, and save up for some extra hours in connection with the two mandatory projects.

Here are some suggestions on what to do after reading the Section 0 and 1 Lecture Notes:

See the Course Material page for more information about the books and PDF files, and about how to install software.

After this you are ready to start the first real exercise of this course. To reach it click HERE!

Have fun!

$Id: index.php,v 1.1 2010/04/18 14:58:53 aake Exp $