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Note: It is strongly recommended that you setup your account from a SunRay, X-terminal or Sun Workstation, rather than from a PC.

• Ft. Garry Campus - 523, 524 Engineering, 113 Machray, 8 Dafoe, 237 Agriculture
• Bannatyne - Medical Library

1. Get a Unix account

2. Set the path and environment variables

Since you'll be typing several commands, you need a terminal window. At this writing, you can get a terminal window from the Hosts menu on the front panel. Click once on the arrow to bring up the Hosts menu and choose "This Host" to open a terminal window.

A terminal window should pop up:

Alternatively, a terminal window can be gotten using the Workspace menu. Hold down the right mouse button on the background area of the screen and choose Hosts --> This Host.

Now you're ready to run the newuser script.

3. The CDE window manager

[NOTE: The following will ONLY work for the CDEwindow manager, and not for other window managers (eg. Motif)]

A window manager is a program that executes when you login from an X-terminalor workstation. It controls how windows are displayed, what windows can do, and the types of programs that can be launched by pointing and clicking. Most X11 programs can be run regardless of the window manager in use.

The default window manager on the SUN platform is CDE, the Common Desktop Environment .

Customizing the CDE workspace menu

This menu contains submenus which can be accessed by continuing to hold down the right mouse button, and dragging to the right on the submenu you wish to see. The default menu is shown above. However, the BIRCH system has an expanded set of custom menus that you can use if you wish. The custom menus can be accessed by running 'menusetup' and choosing option 1, as shown below:

{castor:/home/plants/frist}/home/psgendb/admin/menusetup

___________________________________________________________________

                 MENUSETUP - Version 25 Aug 97                     
                  Customize CDE menus
-------------------------------------------------------------------

1) Use customized CDE menus
2) Revert to default CDE menus
   -------------------------------------------------------------
   Type number of your choice or 0 to cancel program:
1
Replacing .dt/dtwmrc file with link to
/home/psgendb/.dt/dtwmrc
Original file is renamed with .bak extension
Logout and log back in for changes to take effect.
{castor:/home/plants/frist}

In this example, the user has dragged right on the Internet item to obtain the Internet menu. The custom menus are more comprehensive than the default menus, and should contain most or all of the X11 applications available to users on the system. Since these menus are updated frequently, the menus are a good way of finding out about new applications as they become available. Note that to use the molecular biology programs, you must have set up your account with the BIRCH newuser script.

The CDE workspace menus are specified a file in your $home/.dt directorycalled 'dtwmrc'. If you don't have such a file, a system default is used. Rather than creating ths file in your $home/.dt directory, menusetup makes a symbolic link to the dtwmrc file in the BIRCH directory, /home/psgendb/.dt. That way, whenever changes are made in the BIRCH dtwmrc file, they take effect for your account as well.

Finally, to return to using the default menus, run 'menusetup' and choose option 2.

There is one disadvantage to launching applications from the root menu. When you launch from the root menu, most applications will use your $home directory as the default for menus that open and close files. Consequently, you will usually have to click through several directories before you get to the file you want. When you launch an application by typing its name, many applications will default to the directory you were in at that time. Consequently, when you open or write files, that will be the first directory that the menu points to.

Customizing your desktop
 
 

What if I want to remove BIRCH access from my Unix account?

To remove BIRCH access for your account, type

/home/psgendb/admin/nobirch