Setting up Windows

Installing WSL

• Install Windows Subsystem for Linux and the VcXsrv X11 server.
• Install the following programs
  • CMake - a cross-platform build system; easier to use than Autotools or writing Makefiles, and will be used as the default build system for the group code
  • Emacs or XEmacs - a customizable text editor
  • Git - a distributed version control system used to manage code development in our group; you must learn to use it, see Git_Guidelines
  • Graph plotting program: gnuplot or Xmgrace
  • Hunspell - a spell-checker program.
  • ImageMagick - a software suite to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images
  • Octave - a Matlab-like environment for numerical computation and graphics
  • Python extensions: NumPy/SciPy/matplotlib/pandas. These extensions define numerical array and matrix type and associated basic operations and support advanced math, signal processing, optimization, statistics, plotting and much more
  • R - a statistical computing and graphics environment
  • TeX typesetting program, including LaTeX: TeX Live

Open a WSL terminal and run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install gnuplot grace imagemagick

Installing common GUI tools

Install Jmol, WinSCP, and others as needed.

• GIMP: an open-source program similar to Adobe Photoshop
• Inkscape: an open-source SVG vector graphics editor
• PuTTY
• Visualization software.
• Text editors for code, markup and prose: Atom, Visual Studio Code, or Sublime Text
• WinSCP

Setting up ssh-agent

• Open a WSL terminal and follow the Ubuntu or Debian section in GPG-Agent.
• Create a new GPG key and an authentication subkey.
• Install the Windows version of GPG-agent following the Windows section.
• Install wsl-ssh-pageant.
• Extract the public key and transfer the public key to the group server.
• Open a new terminal and test if you can SSH to group server without entering a password using the GPG agent:

ssh USER_NAME@server.dept.univ.edu

Keep this terminal open so you can access the sample files on the group server for later steps.

Setting up .ssh/config

• On your computer, create a file ~/.ssh/config, copy the sample setup from the group server, and change the placeholders to appropriate values.
• Make sure to understand Sharing sessions over a single connection and Host alias. Leave Multi-hop for later when you need it but do keep in mind of this option.
• Verify that you have the correct permissions for ~/.ssh/config.

Transferring ssh setup to group server

• Follow the instructions to transfer your ssh setup to the group server.
• Test your SSH setup.