The operating system used on the Duke physics cluster is Linux, based on Fedora Core. See also info on the Duke Computing page. If you are unfamiliar with Linux, you may want to take a bit of time to learn a few commands and concepts: see the links above. You should also learn to use an editor like emacs. Here are just a few very basic Linux commands:
After getting your account, you should change your password as soon as possible.
The default shell is bash: you will want to change it to tcsh if you want to do the tutorials as written (you should only need to do this once.) Do:
A .tcshrc file, which should live in your home directory, contains a list of commands that execute when you login to a new "shell". You should edit a file to do this (see notes on emacs above); for instance you will want to put the setup lines
setenv PROJECT /var/phy/project/hep/neutrino source $PROJECT/soft/sk-k2k-FC8-07d.loginin your .tcshrc file to avoid retyping them all the time.
To log in remotely: you will need to use an ssh client, and log in to login1.phy.duke.edu