Wireless Access

802.11b wireless access to the internet and CITA network is available for any floor that is near the 12th as well as our own.

To access this service, use wireless SSID/login cita and the following 128 bit HEX key: a0b5681adff631b5320744ee5c

VNC Terminal Info

Some of our machines are VNC terminals running off of a central computer. VNC allows a machine to display a desktop running on another machine. You can tell if you're running a VNC machine by the login screen. If it has a light blue background and says it's kodiak or falcon, then you are running a VNC session.

Information on setting up your own VNC session can be found here.

Playing audio CDs on a VNC machine

VNC Issues

Maple

We are having problems with xmaple on VNC machines, all the font characters display as squares. We currently don't know how to fix this, use command line maple or mathematica instead.

Mathematica

In Mathematica, the fonts are also broken under VNC.  To fix them, run these commmands before running mathematica:

xset +fp /cita/local/lib/mathematica-4.0/SystemFiles/Fonts/X
xset +fp /cita/local/lib/mathematica-4.0/SystemFiles/Fonts/Type1
xset fp rehash

gnome-terminal

The version of the terminal (the program that gives you a command line) used by default on our systems has a memory leak which, while acceptable on a stand-alone system, causes long pauses on a shared machine.  The two alternatives to this terminal are xterm and rxvt.

To set up an icon for one of these terminals:
Right click the taskbar (the grey thing at the bottom of the screen, aka Gnome Panel) and click Add to Panel > Launcher from menu > System Tools > Terminal.
Right click the new icon that was created and select Properties.
Type rxvt or xterm in the field labelled Command.

You can customize the look and feel of your terminal by adding command line options.  To see what these options are, in the terminal, type xterm -help or xterm --help or rxvt -help or rxvt --help depending on which terminal you use.  The -help and --help options specify wether you want to see the short or long options respectively.

For example, to have a white on black color scheme for rxvt, you would go to the Properties for you terminal icon and in the Command field type "rxvt -bg black -fg white".