Introduction to Unix Research Computing Workshops Fall 2008 Office of Information Technology & Mississippi Center for Supercomputing Research Jason Hale & Susan Lukose Unix is an Operating System An O/S manages access to the resources of a computer. O/S host applications, shielding them from the hardware. Other popular operating systems: Windows XP, Windows Vista, MAC OS X Unix looks more like DOS than Windows Common Flavors of Unix IBM’s AIX Hewlett Packard’s HP-UX. Sun’s Solaris SGI’s IRIX Apple’s MAC OS X Unix Variants: Linux, BSD, … Why Learn Unix/Linux? Unix/Linux commonly used on computer “servers”: Web servers Database servers Supercomputers/Clusters Over 50% of servers in corporations run Unix or Linux A little Unix experience goes a long way, on the job, and looking for a job . Enterprise • openSUSE • Debian GNU /Linux • Ubuntu • Mandriva Linux • Slackware Linux • Gentoo Components of Unix Shells Kernel Shells System Utilities End-User Utilities Development tools Docs Commands MCSR. cluster for calculations too big for your PC or MAC Student programming assignments may be completed on MCSR/UM systems Distributions of Linux • Red Hat Enterprise Linux • Fedora • SUSE Linux Enterprise • openSUSE • Debian. Variants: Linux, BSD, … Why Learn Unix /Linux? Unix /Linux commonly used on computer “servers”: Web servers Database servers Supercomputers/Clusters Over 50% of servers in corporations run Unix or Linux A