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

However, DCS 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!

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,e of course, select the Unix EOL convention). It works well on Windows 2000 and XP; recent versions seem to work on Vista.

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 use ftp to transfer files to/from your University account (on DOI Windows PCs) using the command (from the CS student system) ftp -p pebble-ftp

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. You have all seen me struggling with this in lectures - enough said. 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

Currently, we have a pre-compiled version for 32-bit x86 Linux, such as on the CS student system. See the links page.

A 32-bit x86 Windows version is also available from the same link. Even if this works for you, there is still another problem: the PeANUt software can only handle .ass and .mli files which follow the Unix EOL convention (EOL = '\n'). This means that preparing PeANUt source files using native Windows editors will be problematic. One solution is to install Cygwin (recommended for other reasons, see above) and prepare your files on a Cygwin editor such as emacs.

Installing PeANUt from source on your Home Computer

First you need to download the source code, and unpack it. After that, it is likely to be non-trivial. If you have Linux with gcc and Tcl/Tk (8.4 or later), it might not be too hard (but you will probably have to install the Tix library - instructions are in the Peanut tarball). On a Mac or other Unix-based machine, you may also have to edit the Makefiles.

On Windows/Cygwin, you can install the binaries (assemble etc). I recently did this on XP - I did not have to change anything (the compilation and installation of the GUI will fail but ignore this). It will be problematic to get the GUI installed, as of 2005 Cygwin ceased to support Tcl/Tk.

However, there is support for Tcl/Tk and Tix on Windows itself, so it is in theory possible to install PeANUt on Windows/Cygwin or even just plain Windows ( Source Navigator is an application based on Tcl/Tk/Tix that runs on windows and its zip file contains Tcl/Tk/Tix dlls and executables).

If you happen to have any success in installing PeANUt on a non-Linux box, it would be great to have the benefit of your experience, and have further instructions / tips collated here. As stated elsewhere, DCS cannot provide support for this, but you may get useful suggestions by posting to our discussion forum.

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