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There are a number of ways PeANUt can be accessed or used on external sites.

However, SoCS will only take responsibility for the correct functioning and the availability of PeANUt software installed on the CS (Linux) student system. If you attempt to use the PeANUt software on external sites, it will be entirely at your own risk! (and you should also do a final testing of your codes on the CS student system before submitting them for assessment).

Furthermore, do not use any old (predating v2.15 or 2010) versions of Peanut - as these are not fully compliant with the PeANUt specification.

Useful References

Chapters 7 and 9 of the Student Computing Environment (Unix commands), and the CS Undergraduate Student System Documentation (sections on file transfer and home computing).

Remote access to the CS Student System

You can get a remote connection with a Unix command line interface via Secure Shell (SSH). The client is called partch.anu.edu.au . On a Windows box, the utility PuTTY can be used to do this I recommend that you also install PSCP and PuTTYgen at the same time, and get a copy of the documentation, for more advanced usage). On Mac and Linux boxes, SSH is normally already installed and is accessed from the command line: ssh -Y u0419191@partch.anu.edu.au.

An arguably superior alternative to PuTTY is Cygwin, which adds a Linux-like command line interface (including SSH, SCP and GCC) to a Windows box. One advantage is that it has an X11 windows server (startx). When you download, I recommend selecting `Install All' (and select the Unix EOL convention). It works well on Windows 2000 and XP; recent versions also work on Vista.

Alternately, MinGW/MSYS is a lighter-weight way of getting GNU utilities (including bash, scp and gcc) on Windows. These are also needed for a Peanut installation from source.

Transferring files to/from the CS Student System

It is safest and most convenient if this is done via the scp command (available with SSH). With PuTTY, there is a corresponding utility called PSCP (pscp.exe), which uses a DOS command interface.

You can transfer files to your University account (on DOI Windows PCs) via Webdav or the command cadaver https://pebble.anu.edu.au/users/u9999999 (where u9999999 is your username).

Setting up SSH keys for passwordless connections to the CS Student System

Setup your SSH keys on your home computer via ssh-keygen -t dsa on Linux, and via PuTTYgen on Windows (see the PuTTY documentation for details). Ensure that you give an empty passphrase. To complete the process, on the CS student system, you need to execute the command ssh-keygen -t dsa as well (give an empty passphrase) and add your public RSA key (typically stored in a file called id_rsa.pub on your home computer) to the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the CS student system.

Seeing up SSH keys on your account on the student system will obviate you having to type your password when using the submit command. All you need to do is add the contents of the file id_rsa.pub here to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys as well.

The above method involves the use of an empty passphrase. This is insecure in the sense that if the account where you log from becomes compromised, your student account may become compromised as a result. An alternate method would be to give a non-empty passphrase (and remember it!). Then for every session, run ssh-add. This will ask you for that passphrase, but for every ssh connection you make in that session afterwards, you will not need to type a password or passphrase (thanks to Sohum Banerjea, COMP2300 2008, for pointing this out).

Running Remote Windows on the CS Student System

From a Linux box (or Mac, or Windows PC with Cygwin), you can open windowing applications from partch remotely, provided ssh has been set up to do `X windows tunnelling' (and you start an X11 server program if on Mac / Cygwin). However, you will need an excellent broadband connection for this to be satisfactory. Then you can create editor and Peanut windows remotely from the command line on partch.

On Windows with only PuTTY, you can still do so provided you have an X11 windows server installed. This is the case with the ANU DOI PCs which have PuTTy and WinAxe installed. You need to enable X11 tunneling in PuTTy; further details are here. It's a bit of a struggle - I sometimes do this in lectures but only when I have to. An alternative for the ANU DOI PCs is to install PeANUt in your home directory area - see below.

Installing pre-compiled PeANUt from on your Home Computer

This is quite easy - little more than unpacking a zip file (and if it doesn't work, you will at least find out quickly :). Currently, we have pre-compiled versions for 32-bit x86 Linux and Windows. See the links page.

Note that the PeANUt software can now handle both the "\n" EOL convention (Unix) and the "\r\n" EOL convention (used by most Windows text file editors including WordPad) but not the "\r" only EOL convention. Ensure that any editor that you use to prepare Peanut source files follows one of the first two conventions. Note that under Cygwin, you can use editors such as emacs which use the Unix convention.

Installing PeANUt from source on your Home Computer

First you need to download the source code, and unpack it (using the tar xvfz command). If you have GNU utilities (including make and gcc) and Tcl/Tk (8.4 or later) already installed, it will be easier (but you will probably still have to install the Tix library).

The installation was made much easier when Jack Kelly (BSEng, 2009) put the sources under the autoconf utility, and make the first Windows installation. There are a number of things that may be needed to download and install, but the instructions are in the Peanut tarball and most of the steps are automated.

If you happen to have any success in installing PeANUt on a non-Linux box, please post any tips on the course discussion forum. This can also be used for posting problems (describe them as precisely as possible, including the error messages verbatim), but, apart from that, SoCS cannot provide any support for home installation.

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