Important things to read

• One preferred email client is pine, but you are welcome to use something else if you are more comfortable with it. The tutorial Getting Started with Pine covers all the basic stuff, and a bit more, and the Pine User's Guide has some more information, as well.
• Using a web browser (which you must already be doing if you are reading this) will also be quite handy. I like Netscape Navigator, (or its other version, Mozilla), but any other browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer is OK if you want. You can get Netscape and MSIE from Netscape and Micro$oft, respectively.
• We may sometimes have documents on the web which are in PDF form (Portable Document Format). To read these you will need to have a copy of the freely available Adobe Acrobat Reader on your machine. You can get this from Adobe.
• If you need to look at a PostScript document, a free viewer can be had from the GhostScript site.
• We will be using Maple extensively. Some useful information about using Maple can be found in various places on the web, including a nice collection of some stock answers to maple questions at MIT, a collection of maple resources (including a tutorial or two) at Indiana University, the Maple lab manual from Worcester Polytechnical Institute, and, of course, the home of Maple at Waterloo Maple Software.
• Since we will be doing most of our work (in class at least) on a Unix system, you should look over Using Unix. Also useful are the UNIXhelp tutorial, and sections of UNIX is a four-letter word.
• It is quite possible to access the mathlab machines remotely, either via ssh, telnet, ftp, X11, or Vnc. Ask me for specifics, if you are unsure how to do any of the following.
  • To run simple commands at a terminal (i.e. something with no graphics, like submitting your homework), run the command 'ssh mathlab.sunysb.edu' or 'telnet mathlab.sunysb.edu', and then you can login to your mathlab account.
  • To remotely run graphical applications, like Maple, from a non-unix machine, you will need a vnc viewer. Here is an executable vnc viewer for Windows (and the license agreement), but clients for other types of machines can be had from tightvnc.com and AT&T research. To use vnc, you can connect to mathlab.sunysb.edu:5950 (1024x768), mathlab.sunysb.edu:5951 (800x600), or mathlab.sunysb.edu:5952 (1200x900).
  • To transfer files between your home computer and the mathlab machines, you can use any FTP program. For example, use a web brower and instead of the URL, type:
    ftp://userid@mathlab.sunysb.edu
    A window will appear prompting you for your password, and then the browser will show your mathlab files. Simply drag and drop to transfer files.