Condor and Woodstock
What is Condor, and how can I get an account?
Condor is one of Wesleyan's two main Unix machines on campus, and is primarily used for web applications. All students enrolled at Wesleyan have a Condor account. The default password is your 6 digit birthday and your 6 digit WesID. You can change the password once you log in by following the steps below. If your temporary password has expired, you can bring your WesID to the Helpdesk and have it reset.
Web Pages
All students have a directory in Condor in which they can create and maintain a web page. Once you are logged into Condor, type "html" to be transferred to your personal web publishing area. For more information on how to actually create a web page, please go to http://www.wesleyan.edu/its/web/wwwhelp.html.
Quotas
All students have the same quotas on Condor. You have 10 megabytes in your home account, and another 10 megabytes in your web publishing area. This is plenty of space for normal use.
What is Woodstock, and how can I get an account?
Woodstock Wesleyan's main academic computer. Academic applications like SPSS, Envie, etc. run on Woodstock. It is important to remember that your Woodstock account is different from your Condor account. All students have an account on Woodstock. Like your Condor password, the default password is your 6 digit birthday and your six digit WesID. You can change the password once you log in by following the steps below. If your temporary password has expired, you can bring your WesID to the Helpdesk and have it reset.
Passwords
To change your password, log in and type passwd. You are then prompted to enter your old passwd and then your new password. That's it!
Programs to Access Condor and Woodstock
Condor and Woodstock can be accessed from any telnet program, as well as X-windows programs such as Exodus or X-win32. If you are unsure how to access Condor and Woodstock, ask your professor or contact the Helpdesk.
Programs you can use on Condor and Woodstock
There are many programs that you can use on Condor and Woodstock. We'll try to break them down into a few easy categories.
Editors
There are three main text editors you can use on Condor. To use any of them, simply type their name at the prompt, and the program will start up. We'll briefly describe them here, one at a time.
Pico
Most of you may already be familiar with this editor. If you have ever used PINE to send an e-mail, you were actually writing that letter in Pico. It is the default text editor used by PINE. A very useful command is ctrl-G (written at the bottom of the Pico screen as ^G). This is the help command. If you flip through this, it will tell you all of the commands that you will need to use Pico. Another command that is helpful is ^X This is exit, but if have written anything, it will prompt you to save the document you are working on before exiting. There are other commands written across the bottom of the screen, in order to make using this editor a little more easy.
Vi
Vi is an editor which I've found is adored by some and absolutely hated by others but never in between. A few simple commands are as follows:
- dl deletes a letter
- dw deletes a word
- dd deletes an entire line
- i starts insert mode
- a starts append mode
- When you want to quit one mode (delete, insert, etc.) and start another, hit Escape.
- When you want to quit, hit Escape until a colon (:) appears at the bottom of the screen (this should appear after hitting Escape two times), and then type q! to quit immediately, or type wq to write the file to disk (save the file) and then quit.
Emacs
The last, and probably most popular, editor is Emacs. This is a very nice editor, which can come with many of the options that you would find in a normal word processing program. A few helpful key strokes to know:
- Ctrl-x Ctrl-f will give you a prompt to open a file
- Ctrl-x Ctrl-s will save a file
- Ctrl-x Ctrl-c will quit the program
- Ctrl-h ? is the help command
Toys
There is a function, called "finger" in which you can see if someone is logged into condor or another computer, as long as that computer can accept finger requests. For example, if I wanted to see if my friend Random Student (who has username rstudent) is logged into Condor, at a prompt I can type finger rstudent@machinename and it will tell me if rstudent is logged into the machine indicated after the @ sign, and give me some more information about rstudent.
Another fun function is "write," which will let you write a message to another person who is logged into Condor. For example, if I want to write to rstudent, I would type write rstudent and then, on the next line, which it would put the cursor on, I could type a message. I can type one line messages, and every time I hit "enter," the message is sent to rstudent's terminal. Rstudent will get a message on his screen saying message from myusername on condor.wesleyan.edu... and then the message will appear on his screen. To quit this function, just hit Ctrl-c.
One more function you might like to use is the "ytalk" function. If, while he's logged in, I type ytalk rstudent@machinename a screen will appear and, if rstudent wants to talk to me, he can type ytalk myusername@mymachine and then the screen on my computer will split in half. I can type in the top half, and his type appears on the bottom. We can then have a real-time conversation. To quit this function, just type Ctrl-c, just like before.