Stanford has site licenses for lots of Mac software, including the latest version of the Operating System, networking software (MacSamson), SLIP, X, Netscape, and Stanford software for searching local corpora, including the Oxford English Dictionary: Check the ``Site Licensed'' server in the Stanford AppleTalk zone. Although TeX is available for Macs, most Mac users around here use Word for their word processing. There are some very nice IPA fonts that work with Word: Ecological Linguistics (PO Box 15156, Washington DC 20003) and Linguist's Software (PO Box 580, Edmonds WA 98020-0580) are two good sources. There are also fonts and programs which help you draw syntactic trees, matrices, etc.
Outside of the department, there are hundreds of Macs freely available at various on-campus computer clusters.
Outside of the department, there are also more and more Windows PCs becoming available at various on-campus computer clusters.
Aside from email, Unix machines offer some very nice programs for reading Usenet news groups (bulletin boards). People in the department also use Unix for running LaTeX, which is arguably the best system for producing high-quality paper documents. If you wish to study text corpora, you might find Unix useful because of its flexibility, and because the department has a large collection of corpora available from Unix machines.
The Leland System, a distributed network of Unix computers, is Stanford's primary academic computing infrastructure and is administered by Distributed Computing Consulting in Sweet Hall. The Leland System provides free computer accounts, email, web resources and other computing services to the Stanford community. Over 100 Unix workstations from various makers (Sun, DEC, IBM, etc.) are available 24 hours a day in Sweet Hall. In addition, the Unix servers Cardinal, Tree and Junior can be accessed remotely by anyone with a Leland account; most people use Cardinal to read email. At the beginning of each academic quarter, Sweet Hall Consulting offers a series of introductory classes open to all students, faculty and staff, covering topics such as basic Unix commands, email, file editing, the X Windows system, and Usenet newsgroups.
The Linguistics Department also maintains several Unix machines. All of our public Windows PCs also run the Linux variety of Unix. There are several Unix workstations available in the Phonetics Laboratory (in the basement of the Psychology building) for research in phonetics (see Edward Flemming or the Phonetics Lab RA for accounts).
Students and faculty affiliated with CSLI are given accounts on
Turing, the main CSLI computer. People who receive their email on
CSLI computers usually have email addresses ending in
csli.stanford.edu rather than
leland.stanford.edu.
If you get accounts on more than one computer, remember to have
all email forwarded to the computer you read your email on. On most
Unix systems you just put your email address in a file called
.forward in your home directory, and make that
file readable: chmod a+r .forward But on leland
you have to use the command lelandforward
character is basically anything that you can type
in a single keystroke: `a', `A', `2' and `*' are all characters) long.
Longer passwords up to 16 characters are accepted on the leland
system, but you will not be able to use certain Mac-based services
such as AppleShare. The system will reject passwords that are equal to
your account name or some permutation of it (such as writing it
backwards), words occurring in a dictionary, and various others, see
the DCG
page about leland passwords. The best password would be a
collection of eight characters containing no discernible patterns. On
the other hand, you might find that a random collection of eight
characters like d8Jo-4*v is difficult to
remember. If you pick a password that you can't remember, you will
have no recourse but to write it down. And then you will need to keep
that piece of paper in some convenient spot, which is not safe either.
One way to make a password that is memorable but hard to guess is to
base it on some text, preferably an obscure one that you do not go
around reciting all the time. Build the password from the first
letter of each word, finding a way to work in a non-letter. For
example, if you use the obscure poem that begins `There was a young
man from Nantucket,' your password might be
TwaymfN,. The password is your only line of security, so
pick a good one, don't write it down, change it once a year or so, and
don't share it with your dearest friend.
cardinal and hit Return.
If you are using one of the public Macs, make sure the program
MacSamson is running and active. When it is, select from the
File menu New Telnet
session.... This will bring up a window with a field for
entering the Host. Set this to
cardinal (the other fields are not important), then click on the
Open button. You will get a new window
containing a connection to cardinal.
When you have connected to cardinal, it will display
the request
login: At
this point you should type your account name, then hit the
Return key. You must type in your account name exactly as
given to you. In particular you must observe the distinction between
lower-case and upper-case letters. If your account
name is wang, it is no use saying that should be
capitalized just because that is your last name: Enter it exactly in
that form. One of the distinctive properties of Unix is that it
always cares about the distinction between upper and lower case.
The computer will then ask:
Password:
Type in your password exactly, then hit Return.
You won't see your password on the screen (lest some passer-by see it
as well).
If either the account name or the password was incorrect, the machine will reply
Login incorrect
and give you a chance to try again. You get three chances.
Once you have successfully logged in, the computer may type something like
TERM = (vt100)
It is asking you what kind of terminal you are using. For a
Macintosh, vt100 is an appropriate answer. Type it in, then hit
Return.
There is also a chance that you will be shown one or more messages.
Some messages just appear every time you log in. For others, the
computer first asks whether you want to see them. The correct answer
is y then Return. If you
don't understand the message, then it is probably safe to ignore it.
>), at which you can type in a command. When
you hit Return, the computer will execute the
command, often typing output back at you. When you get another
prompt, the computer is ready for the next command.
The simplest type of command for Unix is a simple word, followed by
Return. For example, if you type
date
the system will print the current date and time. Henceforth I will refrain
from mentioning that you need to hit the Return
key after each command.
All you have to do to log out is type
logout
I suggest you do this now, even if you are eager to explore further. This will give you a chance to practice logging in again, and you can try using your new password.
If you are working on a Macintosh, close the session window.
lynx is a program similar to the more familiar
netscape, but it can run on vt100 terminals. A
WWW page consists of text (there are also pictures and sounds, but
you're not going to get these on a dumb terminal), some of which is
specially highlighted to indicate that it is a link to another piece
of text. You can hit the space bar to scroll through a page of text;
the up and down arrows to select the previous or next link; the right
arrow to go where the currently selected link points to; and the left
arrow to get back to the place you were at before you followed the
most recent link. You can also type G, then a
URL, to go directly to some page on the WWW. This will work for all
the URL's mentioned in this guide.
http://www-linguistics/linguistics/ will get you to
general information about the Linguistics Department. And you should
definitely try URL
http://doors/~sr/computing/, which contains links to
almost everything you might want to know about computing, including
information about local computers. Type H at any
time to learn more about lynx, and
Q to exit the program.
cardinal without learning a text editor, you don't want to.
In order to avoid sending mail with lots of typos and references like
``Forget everything I said two lines above'', you'll need to learn a
program that lets you edit what you have already typed. And an editor
is a necessity for writing and editing papers: You can save your
papers to a file and edit them again later to make the unending stream
of revisions that is the lot of the grad student. The editor you will
want to use on Unix machines is called emacs.
You'll want to learn it real soon. See URL
http://doors.stanford.edu/~sr/computing/emacs.html for
information about emacs. The Sweet Hall
consultants offer introductions to Emacs.
/var/mail/. A mail program lets you treat this as a set of
individual messages that can be read, deleted, forwarded, replied to,
or saved in different files. It also makes it much easier to send
mail messages. But mail program in general all do pretty much the
same thing, Unix provides an astonishing variety of them, and you will
find partisans here of each of them. You might want to consider
mail, a very old program whose sole advantage is
that it is found on all Unix computers, no matter how badly maintained
they are; or rmail, a very old program whose sole
advantage is that it is built into, and therefore fairly well
integrated with, emacs. We recommend elm, which
is new enough to have some fancy features, but old enough to have most
of its bugs worked out. It is one of the most commonly used mailers
on campus. Its interface is clear enough that you can pretty nearly
make do by just typing elm and then playing it by
ear. But do look at
http://doors.stanford.edu/~sr/computing/elm.html, and
consider taking the Sweet Hall class on the subject; take the Emacs
class first.
Your own mail address will be your Leland account name, to which is
appended to @leland.stanford.edu, e.g.,
jsmith@leland.stanford.edu. This is the form you
should give out whenever people outside the department ask for your
Internet mail address. But you don't really have to type such long
addresses in most cases: You can truncate the parts of the address
that you share with the recipient. So instead of sending mail to
myfriend@leland.stanford.edu, you can send mail to
myfriend@leland. (Similarly, you don't really
have to include the .stanford.edu part when
accessing local URL's via netscape or lynx.)
We recommend that you use the news reader nn.
There are thousands of groups out there, and so you might want
to consider starting off small; otherwise you may find the wealth of
material either tremendously frustrating, or tremendously addictive.
The Unix man page explains all about
nn: Type man nn. Or if you
are really adventurous and want to get your feet wet immediately, type
nn, then :man, then
=.*, then Z, then hit the
space bar to step through the manual that is built into the program.
The manual is organized as a series of news articles within a news
group dedicated to the nn manual, so you get to practice even before
you know what you are doing. (Hint: to quit, type
Q.)
Some students feel that since Word is by all accounts easier to use,
they will start off using Word then switch to LaTeX when the time
comes to submit a really fancy paper somewhere. Keep in mind though
that that day is coming much sooner than you think. Since the two
systems are completely different, learning Word will not prepare you
for learning LaTeX, and so you will have to start learning again from
scratch, precisely at that point when you have no time to learn a
stupid document processing system. See
http://doors.stanford.edu/~sr/computing/latex.html for
more information on LaTeX. And by all means cajole your fellow
students for their source files, to use as a pattern or for
inspiration.