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:

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: 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