Galaxy Communicator Tutorial:
Getting Started
The tutorial portion of the Galaxy Communicator
documentation makes a few assumptions about you, your Galaxy Communicator
installation, and your computing environment. Two of these have already
been noted:
-
There are special instructions for installing
the distribution so that the tutorial
can be run.
-
The tutorial currently only runs on Unix,
and it assumes familiarity with the Unix command line.
In the remainder of this document, we'll describe
what else you need to do to get yourself started.
Reference environment
We believe that the training course should
work on any Unix environment on which the Galaxy Communicator installation
can be installed. However, for reference purposes, here is the configuration
of our development environment for the tutorial:
-
Hardware: Sparc Ultra 10
-
OS: Solaris 2.7
-
X implementation: /usr/openwin
-
Window manager: fvwm
-
Shell: tcsh
-
Editor: emacs 20.4.1
-
Python version: 1.5
If your behavior differs from ours, it may
be due to a difference in environment.
Start up X windows
The tutorial assumes that you're running X.
Since you're reading this documentation, you're almost certainly in X already
if you're on a Unix machine.
Set up your shell environment
For convenience and generality, we use the
shell variable $GC_HOME to
refer to the root of your Galaxy Communicator installation. We recommend
that you set this value in your shell. So if your Galaxy Communicator installation
root is /usr/local/GalaxyCommunicator-3.2,
do this:
csh/tcsh:
% setenv GC_HOME /usr/local/GalaxyCommunicator-3.2
sh/bash:
$ GC_HOME=/usr/local/GalaxyCommunicator-3.2; export GC_HOME
At this point, you should be able to run the
examples in the tutorial.
If you add these settings to your shell
startup file file, you can run the examples from any X terminal. Otherwise,
you will only be able to run the examples in the X terminal in which you
make these settings, because the PATH value you'll set in the next step
is usually overwritten when you start up a new shell.
Modify your path
In order to save heaps of typing, we recommend
that you add a couple directories to your Unix search path. One is the
location of the main Hub executable, and the other is a directory which
hosts a number of useful MITRE tools.
csh/tcsh:
% setenv PATH $GC_HOME/bin:$GC_HOME/contrib/MITRE/tools/bin:$PATH
sh/bash:
$ PATH=$GC_HOME/bin:$GC_HOME/contrib/MITRE/tools/bin:$PATH; export
PATH
In all the examples, we'll assume that the
path has been updated as shown here.
If you add these settings to your shell
startup file file, you can run the examples from any X terminal. Otherwise,
you will only be able to run the examples in the X terminal in which you
make these settings, because the PATH value is usually overwritten when
you start up a new shell.
Next: The
basics: how the Hub and server communicate, and what they say
Please send comments and
suggestions to: bugs-darpacomm@linus.mitre.org
Last updated September 10, 2001.
Copyright (c) 2001
The MITRE
Corporation
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED