The X-Window System on the SUNs

Departments of Mathematics & Statistics, University of South Carolina

Login Procedure

When not in use, the SUN workstations should display a login window with the words Login: and Password: in it. (If the screen is black, move the mouse a little bit to activate the monitor.) To login to any of these machines, type in your login name, press return, type in your password and press the return button again. After a few seconds the display will change, and you will see your usual windows appearing on the screen.

Screen Layout

A few seconds after the login procedure is complete, you will see the startup procedure kick in.
First the Message of the Day window will pop up if there are new system related messages, such as times when the machines are not available, new software information, etc. (If you want this window to go away fast, you need to click on the button on the lower part of the window.)
Then your start-up files will execute and start a number of applications. These include a clock, a mailbox, an Icon Manager and an xterm. The gray background is called the root window. Your screen will basically look like this:

The clock (in the top left corner) measures time as usual.
The mailbox (next to it) has a flag that goes up and beeps at you if you get new e-mail.
The xterm (in the lower left corner) is a place, where you can type in UNIX commands for the computer to execute.
The Icon Manager (top right corner) manages your windows. By clicking on any row of the window manager alternatively hides or shows the windows of the applications. Another way to hide a window is to click on the small icon on the left side of its title bar; but to bring it back, you really need to use the Icon Manager.
Initially three xterms are created, but as you can see only one of them is open. You can open the others by following the procedure described above.

Default Menus

To help you with the most frequently encountered tasks there are three pop-up menus. Each entry in a menu performs a simple tasks without having to type in anything in an xterm window explicitly. To see what is in the pop-up menus, move the mouse, so the cursor is placed somewhere in the root window, and press one of the mouse buttons. To activate any of the entries, slide the mouse till the cursor points to the appropriate entry, then release the mouse button.
Here is how the three menus may look like:

The first menu is the most frequently used.

Logins performs the task of opening an xterm and doing a remote login to another machine. The entries SUN-310 and SUN-412 have sub-entries, referring to all available machines in those rooms.
Shells opens up an xterm with the appropriate start-up shell. Currently we support sh, csh, tcsh.
Tools lists a number of applications, that you can start using this menu. This way you don't have to type in the name of the application in an xterm, and therefore can use that window for other tasks.
The second menu may look different than above, as it contains all your current applications. By selecting any of these entries opens up the actual application and moves the cursor to its window.
The third menu lists some window-manager related tasks, the help of which you can adjust the size or position of a window, delete some applications that does not have a QUIT button, or Exit the X Window System.

Working with the SUNs

Depending on what applications you want to run you have two options.

To start some of the frequently used applications, move the mouse to the root window, and press down the left button. Then move the cursor down to the application you want to invoke and release the button. If the application you are looking for is not there, you need to type in its name manually.
To communicate with the computer by manually typing in the commands, you need to use a window called xterm. When you login to any of the SUNs, your default setup will open 3 such xterms for you, one of which is open and ready to except commands, two of them is iconified. Move the mouse so the cursor points to the window that is open and start typing the commands. If one window is not enough for you, open up the other two xterms using the Icon Manager, as described above. You can also start up other xterms.

Exiting the X Window System

Position the cursor to the root window, press the right mouse button, slide the cursor down to the Exit line and release the mouse button. After a few seconds the windows close up one-by-one, and the screen will show the original login screen.