Date of last revision: 10/1/1998

Many of the software packages in the Design Center require you to take certain actions to set up your account to use those applications. This allows you to set up for only the applications you actually use.

Whenever possible, we have installed applications so that the setup scripts fit the standard scheme given here, but you should check the Helpme file for an application to see if it requires anything different.

General Setup Information

 The way to set up for applications is to "source" (read commands from) a file with commands that modify your environment. This has the same effect as typing all of the commands in manually.

We have set up "aliases" to simply the application setup process. If you wish to use an application named APP, all you need to type is:

setup APP

All applications that support this will tell you the name to use in place of APP in their Helpme pages.

If you want to set up several applications, you can list them on the same line or on separate lines.

If you plan to use the same application frequently, you can have this setup step performed automatically every time you log in by adding the setup line to the files .profile and .cshrc in your home directory. Note that both filenames begin with a period. (In fact, you really only need to use one of those files, depending on which login shell you are using. You can check in "helpme shells" to determine which is appropriate for you, or you can just put it in both files.).

The easiest way to edit these files is with the command "pico .profile" (or .cshrc) which starts a user-friendly editor.

If you have problems

 You should not need to read this section unless the general instructions given above did not work for you. This section outlines the commands behind the aliases listed above.

Unfortunately, different Unix shells use different commands. (See "helpme shells" if you do not know what a shell is.) This means that different files must be sourced for different shells, and that even the command to source a file is different.

Fortunately, shells can be broken into two major groups: those derived from the Bourne shell, and those derived from the C shell. If you are not sure which shell you are using, you can use the command getshell `whoami` to find out (note that those are back-quotes, not normal single quotes). If your shell is sh, ksh, bash, or zsh, use the Bourne shell setup information. If your shell is csh or tcsh, use the C shell setup information. Note: The Design Center recommends bash, and automatically uses bash as the shell for new users.

Bourne Shell Setup Information

 To set up for an application called "APP" you must give the command:

. /usr/local/scripts/setup.APP.sh

Note that there is a space between the period and the / at the beginning.

You may add lines with this format to your .profile as well. Each application must be listed on its own line.

C Shell Setup Information

 To set up for an application called "APP" you must give the command:

source /usr/local/scripts/setup.APP.csh

You must use a line like this for each application you wish to set up.

If you plan to use an application often, you may add the setup line to your .cshrc file. You must list each application on a separate line.

Multiple Versions of Applications

 We sometimes have more than one version of an application installed on the system. This is usually done when we are making a new version available for testing or keeping an old version for a while to make sure a new version works.

Most applications have two setup scripts--one for the specific version, and one general one for all versions of that application. Because all versions of the application will have the same general name, the setup script for that name will only refer to the version we feel most people should be using. You should use the general name when you call the setup script unless you need to use a specific version. The Helpme page for each application should list both its general and version-specific names.

Warning: You should not perform setup actions for two versions of the same application in one login session. You might end up using the version you did not want, or you may access a mixture of the versions.

To see a list of all versions of an application which we have on the system, type

app_versions APP

where APP is the application you want to check on. The app_versions command will accept either version names or general ("family") names.