See also the Welcoming Note and Unix Tips.

When working under Unix you will use the man command frequently. Use man <command> to see the UNIX manual page describing <command>, and man -k <keyword> to get the list of commands whose short descriptions contain <keyword>.
If you telnet from your office Mac or PC, and you can have both your telnet window and Netscape, use the Manual Gateway to get the same manuals in www format (you can even print them from Netscape).

The following software can be run when you log in remotely:

• telnet, ftp, pine, elm, rlogin, finger, ping
  work as usual under UNIX

• Text Editors: emacs, vim
  vim is modified Vi. Now it shows if you are in the command or insert mode.

• TeX and friends (tex, latex, amstex)
  Should you need to use your own style (or other TeX input file), place it in the texinputs directory in your home directory. TeX is configured to look there first, and then go on to its own input directories.

• dvips (Usage: dvips your_file.dvi )
  Creates your_file.ps, PostScript for your DVI

• latex2html (Usage: latex2html my_file.tex )
  Creates the directory my_file in the directory where you run your command (I suggest you run it in your WWW directory, which is where the web server looks for your pages). Inside that directory are your html files and little GIF images of your formulas.

  There are two options you might want to use to exclude the navigation bar buttons and the info link from your page: use
  

      latex2html -no_navigation -info 0 my_file.tex
  

  Read ONLINE MANUAL to learn more about this highly customizable program.

• tth, a TeX to HTML converter which, unlike latex2html, tries to represent formulas by the internal means of the new HTML standard (rather than creating a host of .gif files). A short UNIX manual is available though man tth . The detailed TTH manual page is here.

  Usage: tth < your_tex_file.tex > your_html_file.html

• gap and gap4 (GAP 3 and GAP 4 respectively. GAP is the package for doing group-theoretic computations)

  The language of GAP is very close to that of Maple, but the internals are quite different. There was a big change in the implementation from GAP 3 to GAP 4. Not all packages available for GAP 3 have been ported for GAP 4 yet, so we keep both versions.

  Browse our local copies of the GAP 3 MANUAL and GAP 4 MANUAL.

  You can get more information about GAP from the Gap homepage

  The GAP homepage has the most up-to-date versions of the manuals and numerous tutorials (strongly recommended).

  Inside GAP type ??keyword to get the list of topics in which keyword occurs, ?topic to display help on the topic.

• Macaulay-2 (Command: M2 )

  This is the package for doing commutative algebra computations. Find out more about it on the Macaulay2 site.

• lynx (Usage: lynx http://www.whatever.com/ )
  a text-based WWW browser. You can make bookmarks, download files, fill out forms. Unfortunately, none of this is menu-driven, so you have to read on-line help first.

• C++ and C complilers, gcc and g++
  Compile with g++ for C++ stream support.

• Perl 5, a CGI script language of increasing prominence on the World Wide Web.

• netscape
• ftptool, a nice windowed FTP
• xdvi, the DVI viewer
• ghostview, the PostScript file viewer
• lyx, a graphic front end for TeX. Try it!
• xemacs, Emacs with buttons and menus
• the usual suite of X windows wingdings, such as
  xclock, xcalc, xcal etc.

Not configured yet:

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