CEG 233: Linux and Windows

Getting Started with CEG233

Table of Contents

1. Educational Objectives
2. Background
3. Lab Experiment
4. Turnin
5. Acknowledgements
6. References

Educational Objectives

The objectives of this lab experiment are to make you :

1. Become familiar with OSIS Lab
2. Begin to use Linux both with and without GUI
3. Explore a few behind the scenes activities of Windows

Background

[Since this is your first lab in this course, a little bit of introduction regarding the structure of this document is in order.  All future lab descriptions will have the same section structure as shown in the Table of Contents.  The due date for the labs is shown on the course home page. The material described in the Background section should be studied long before a corresponding scheduled lab session, and certainly before you begin the actual Lab Experiment.] 

OSIS (Operating Systems and Internet Security) Lab

The OSIS Lab (429 Russ) has 30 PCs, all networked.   Each PC can be independently booted by students into one of several variations of Linux, or Windows XP Professional.  Each PC is set up so that it can be run "properly" even when disconnected from the network.

The ceg233nn form of of user names are valid only in the OSIS Lab (429 Russ).  While we do not prevent connections to any host, we do not permit remote logins to the machines in the Lab.

Expectations of Your Work

The following are applicable to all your work (labs, projects, home work, and exams) in the course, and will not be repeated in other handouts.

In the OSIS Lab, the PCs are installed with Linux Ubuntu  and Windows XP.  In general, 32-bit or 64-bit does not matter in CEG233, except when explicitly required in a specific lab experiment.

Plagiarism

These projects must be work done solely by you, except for any of the parts I provided during this term.

For work required to be done on Linux, you may use any Linux distribution that you prefer.  For work required to be done on Windows, you may use either XP or Vista.  Doing the lab work on an operating system other than the OS explicitly named constitutes cheating.

Clarifications

Post all your questions, helpful comments, criticisms, and suggestions regarding this project to our discussion group. I am hoping for a lively discussion leading to good answers and clarifications. Keep an eye on this group.

Submissions

All submissions are done using the turnin program located in  /home/ceg233/ceg23300/bin on all the Linux machines in the OSIS Lab. Its first argument is the "name" of the lab, which is uppercase L followed by one digit, e.g., L1. Following this are the names of files that you intend to submit. So, for this part, the command line may look like this:

/home/ceg233/ceg23300/bin/turnin L1 ReadMe.txt myLabJournal.txt answers.txt

assuming that you are in the directory containing the files named above and relevant only to this lab.  It is ok to use turnin for a given Lab# multiple times; as long as the file names are the same as before, the older files will be replaced by newer ones.  You will get an "ls -l" listing of files you turned in.

The following files with names exactly as indicated, are almost always required in each lab.

1. ReadMe.txt: This plain text file must include (i) your name, and e-mail address, (ii) a listing generated by ls -l of the directory containing your project files, (iii) an explanation of how the lab/project was accomplished using the above files, and (iv) highlights both the good points and bugs and problems (if any) that it has.
2. myLabJournal.txt:  This plain text file is like a diary entry.  As you do your work in the lab, enter your observations into this file.  You can typically do this via copy-and-paste of the lines you tyoed followed by the output of the commands with some additional thoughts written up.
3. answers.txt:  This plain text file is a collections of answers to specific items listed in the Grading Sheet and other asked in the lab experiment.

Note that at the risk of losing 10 points, you can email the files to your grader.  If you are a commuter, email the files before the due date, and on or before the date of next class, turnin the same files.

Note that there are different turnin programs specific to a course.  For 233, you must use /home/ceg233/ceg23300/bin/turnin (no spaces) and invoke it from Linux (not Windows). 

Grading Sheet

A grading sheet will be shown as part of every lab/project. You should check with the grade sheet to be sure that you have attempted all that was required.

We try to read your code.  But we depend mostly on observed execution of your code. 

All work for this course is expected (but not required) to be done in the Operating Systems and Internet Security Lab (429 RC) .  If you wish, use your home Unix/Linux/Windows machines, or those in other labs.  However, our grading of your submitted project work includes the execution by us only on OSIS Lab machines. 

Bonus points are awarded in recognition of good work, in addition to the max possible points.  Quality is subjectively judged.  Merely turning in a file will not receive full score. 

Some of the above have a cascading effect.

Getting Started

Events.  A keyboard key press is an event.  Key release is an event. Mouse button presses and releases are events.  And so on.  Time stamp of an event.  Events are coupled to certain actions.  Modern OSs are event driven.

Linux GUI: KDE, and Gnome Desktop Environments.

Cut-and-paste.  KDE cut and paste buffer.  Highlighting, ^C and ^V bindings are similar to Windows.  Additionaly, middle mouse button click can paste what is currently highlighted.

Explained all the window decorations.  Underlined  characters --> ALT+that-key.

Exercise: Login to Linux in the OSIS Lab.  Experiment and become comfortable with all the above.  Tryout Konqueror.  Browse through all the URLs you see.

Shells.  Windows: cmd and command.  Linux: sh, csh, tcsh, ..., bash,  ...  Bourne Again Shell.

bash is an interpreter of a shell langauge.  The shell language is also called bash.  All shell languages are legitimate programming
languages.  Defined by grammars.  Compilers and interpreters have parsers that analyze the "sentences" of a programming language to "recognize" them.  Grammars are defined not at the level of character sequences, but at the level of "words" (called tokens).

E.g., the character sequence "ls -lisa dir01" becomes the token sequence w0, w1, w2 where w0=="ls", w1=="-lisa" and w2=="dir01".  The spaces that separate the tokens do not contribute any tokens; they just "delimit" the tokens.  Where you used one blank, you could have used a dozen, and it would not alter the tokenization.  This procedure is also called Lexical Analysis.

bash treats w0 as the name of a program file.  For the ls-line discussed, it counts the number of arguments (argc) as 3.  It constructs an argv[] vector (synonym for array) of argument strings. It then invokes exec system call of the OS.  Recall that the main method of most programs is declared (say using C++) as int main(int argc, char * argv[]).

Back to w0. This is a name of a file that should be executable.  The bash shell has a variable called PATH, whose value is a sequnce of directory names.  E.g.,

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

is listing the absolute path names of three directories.  The colon separates the names.  bash searches for a file name given by w0 in
each of the directories of PATH, from left to right.  If the list is exhausted, you get a command-not-found error.

A dot by itself stands for the current directory (i.e., where you are at).  You would typically want to insert the dot in the PATH.  At the very front!

A Minimal List of Unix Commands

Learn the commands listed here.  You cannot claim to be Linux-familiar unless you have used them all a few times.  Especially, learn to use the man pages, and the script (read man script) command. 

This is an alphabetical list of standard Linux/Unix commands that you will/should be familiar with. The word "show" or "print" below means display to the stdout.  If you are beginning to learn these commands, do not try them (i) alphabetically, (ii) without first looking them up (at least to figure out how to "exit" / kill a command).

Lab Experiment

All work is expected, but not required, to be carried out in the Operating Systems and Internet Security (OSIS) Lab, 429 Russ.   But, you are welcome to work wherever.  Note that use of both Linux and Windows and other software, that may not always be installed in other facilities, may be needed.

[This is the first lab and there are items in the experiment that we are yet to go over in the next day or two.]

"Explain/Describe", as used below, stands for explaining things in the file named  answers.txt using your own words, not cut-and-paste of some web search results.  This answers.txt file and myLabJournal.txt do have substantial overlap.  If you wish, generate answers.txt from  myLabJournal.txt after you finish the listed tasks.

In Linux

1. Boot into Linux. Create the ReadMe.txt, myLabJournal.txt, answers.txt files as described in Expectations.  Note that you will be editing these files both in Linux and Windows.  Use any text editor you like (e.g., kate in Linux and WordPad in Windows) to edit these files.  Explore and explain if the cut-and-paste model of Windows works in Linux.
2. Invoke a terminal (e.g., konsole) window.  Demonstrate that you properly invoked  at least 10 of the commands from Minimal List of Unix Commands  (other than emacs and vi)  by pasting a few lines into answers.txt from the input/output of each command you tried.
3. Bash files and conveniences
   1. Explain what .bashrc is.
   2. Explain what .bash_history is. 
   3. Explain what an alias is.  Add the following alias to your .bashrc file: 
alias turnin=/home/ceg233/ceg23300/bin/turnin. 
   4. Also, define a new alias of your own (other than turnin), and explain it.
4. Write down how many processes were on the system, not just yours, by using a pipe between ps and wc.
5. Explore KDE, and customize any 5 of eye candy items (wall paper, window decorations, etc.).  Describe what selections/changes you made.

In Windows

1. Boot into Windows XP. Invoke Task Manager.  View all the processes from all users.  Enable VM, page faults, and CPU related columns.  Jot down in the same answers.txt file the numbers you see for System Idle Process and any two among the remaining processes.  Record how many processes were running.  Use wordpad or someother program (not notepad) to edit files created in Linux.
2. Discover the full path name of "My Documents".  Explain how you discovered it.
3. Invoke cmd.  Invoke set.  Explain any 5 of the items displayed.
4. Download the "FileZilla" program from http://portableapps.com/  and install it on your USB drive.  Customize this program.  Describe your customization.
5. Transfer the file answers.txt to your account in unixapps1.wright.edu using any ssh/sftp client program, and explain how you did it.  Note that the username you use for this machine is the one given to you by WSU, which is of the form w123xyz, not the one this course gave you, which is of the form ceg233nn.

Turnin

turnin L1 ReadMe.txt myLabJournal.txt answers.txt

Acknowledgements

References

Grading Sheet for CEG 233: Linux and Windows L1: Getting Started with CEG233 Instructor = Prabhaker Mateti Grader = Weight 5%