The class will use the Indy Lab, Room CoC 130. Lab hours are not set at the beginning of the semester and ultimately depend on student volunteers and what times they have available. You can always remote login as described next.
If the Indy lab is closed or crowded, you are encouraged to access it remotely by modem or other campus machines. You can do this with the telnet or rlogin commands. The Indy lab's machines all have names of Tinytoons characters. Among these are: arnold, plucky, montana, elmyra, gogo, buster, fifi, babs, hamton, sweety, dizzy, furrball, and sneezer. For example, to access sneezer, you would enter the command "rlogin sneezer.cc.gatech.edu".
Once you've logged in, you can edit your programs with vi or emacs and compile with make. If you are logging in from a machine with Xwindows, you can run xedit and other X utilities by entering the command "xhost +" before you use the rlogin command, and the command "export DISPLAY=hostname:0.0" (where hostname is the network name of the machine from which you have logged in) after you have used the rlogin command. You can find your machine's network name by entering the command "hostname". In csh ("c shell"), the equivalent command "setenv DISPLAY hostname:0.0".
You *cannot*, however, execute programs with OpenGL calls remotely. Unfortunately, jot is one of these programs. Executing graphics programs is possible only if you are logging in from a machine that has an X server that supports the GLX extension (Solaris 7 machines should support GLX, as do all Silicon Graphics machines. There are commercial X servers for Windows that support GLX, such as eXceed/3D, but they are fairly expensive).
The purpose of this session is to introduce you to the SGI Indy machines, and to begin to familiarize you with some of the useful features of the system which you will be using for the course.
Exercise 1: Logging in and getting a work area
1) Log in to the machine.
It is sometimes easy to forget that you must move the mouse
pointer so it is INSIDE the white 'logo' screen in order to
enter your login name. Enter your login name, and hit enter.
You will then be prompted for your password, which will not
be shown on the screen. IF you think you typed it incorrectly
backspace to the beginning of the field and try again.
2) Once you are into the machine, you will probably be faced with
a single menu and one icon labeled 'Console'.
Different accounts may be set up differently, but you should
at least see both of these items.
Set up a window to work in. To do this go over to the menu,
with the mouse pointer and click on the item called 'Desktop'.
That should bring up a sub-menu. Click on 'Unix Shell'.
You should now have another window open which you can use to work
in freely.
Exercise 2: Creating A Work Directory and Editing Files
1) You'll want to keep the work for this class organized separately
from other classes you might have. Therefore create a new
directory for it by typing:
mkdir cs4451
(or whatever name you wish to give the directory).
2) Change to this new directory so that you can work in it.
cd cs4451 (or whatever you called it)
3) Copy the files for this session into this new directory:
cp ~cs4451/OpenGL/Makefile .
cp ~cs4451/OpenGL/ex1.c .
4) In this case, you can skip directly to Exercese 3. If
your source file was not named ex1.c, however, you would
need to edit the Makefile before you could compile the c
program. While both emacs and vi are available on the SGI
machines, there is also another very simple to use 'visual'
editor on the system called jot.
Edit the Makefile by typing
jot Makefile
5) To change the name of the program being compiled, search
for the current program name, 'ex1'. You can do this in one
of two ways.
a) Move the cursor up to the menu bar and choose 'Select'
hold the mouse button down, and move the mouse down
until the 'Search Forward' option is highlighted, and
release the mouse button.
b) Press Shift, Alt and 'F' all at the same time.
6) Enter the search string 'ex1' and hit enter. The editor
will automatically find the word project and highlight it.
Delete the word 'ex1' by hitting the Delete Key.
Type in the name of the new program.
7) Save the file by moving up to the menu bar and selecting
the File menu, and then moving the cursor down to 'Save'.
[This can also be accomplished by using Alt-S]
8) Exit the editor by going to the File menu and then moving the
cursor to 'Exit'. [or type Alt-Q]
Exercise 3:Compiling and Running the Demo Program
1) Move the cursor back into the Unix window.
2) Type 'make'. This is the command you should always use with
this Makefile, and other than changing the project name as above
this Makefile should be usable to compile all of your programs
for this class.
3) Run the program by typing 'ex1'.
You can exit by pressing the ESC key.
Exercise 4: Using On-Line Help System
The SGI machines have an EXTENSIVE help facility, and you will
almost certainly be using it by the end of the quarter unless you
are very familiar with OpenGL (or decide to go buy an OpenGL book
at one of the bookstores).
The most useful part of the help system is the 'On-Line Books'.
1) Go back to the main Desk Menu (upper left corner of the screen)
and click on 'Help'
2) Go down to the 'On-line books' option, and click on it.
Depending on your configuration this may bring up an icon, or
an entire window.
If it brings up only the icon, explode the icon by clicking on it.
3) You'll see a scroll option with a large number of 'book' icons
and names listed. While many of the may be useful to you
(including the C/C++ books) the main one that you'll probably
want is about half way down the list.
Scroll down until you find the OpenGL Programming Guide
(it's the first 'all grey' book icon)
Open this book by double clicking on it. Again this may come
up in icon form. If so click on the icon to open the book.
*WARNING* To clear up your screen, you can 'iconify' the
book list now, but do not 'close' that window, or the
programming guide will also disappear.
4) The book window will be in two panels.
The top panel is a 'chapter list' of the book.
The lower panel is the actual 'book text'
Explore around in the book. The chapter you are currently reading
will be highlighted in the upper panel, and you can jump
directly to other chapters by clicking on them in the upper
panel.
The on-line book system also offers a search option which
can be used to find certain topics (or reference certain
routine names you need the call format) and will highlight
all of the occurances through the book and make it easy to
search through and find what you need.
5) Explore around the other available books and help options.
In one of the intro files I posted to the class newsgroup
there are paths for demo programs (which I have not tried
but I think are available).
6) When you want to log out, just select the 'Log Out' option by
either moving the cursor out of all the windows (against the
plain background) and select 'Log out'.
'Log out' is also an option from the main 'Desktop' menu item.