Guide for new students
If this is your first course at the department of Computing Science here in Umeå, you will need to spend some time getting acquainted with our computer systems. Before reading any further, make sure that you have:
- Registered for the course (send an email to if you have not done so already); and
- obtained a user name and password for the computer systems (if you do not have one, visit or send an email to Support to get one -- remember to tell them that you need it for this course, and that you either are registered, or in the processes of becoming a registered student)
Once you have your login credentials, you should try logging in. Perhaps the most intuitive way of doing this, is to log in to the webmail system. Your login name is also your email address here at the department, and you can send and receive emails using the address "yourloginname@cs.umu.se". Try to send one to your main account, just for fun.
Transferring files
You hand in your assignments by uploading files from your computer to our servers. You do so by using a protocol called SCP or SFTP (both transfer files encrypted over the Internet). You will most likely need to install some software to do this. The following are common choices, but feel free to find another program if these do not suit you:
The majority of these programs will display the local files on one side of the screen, and the server's files on the other side -- to transfer, you drag the files from one location to the other.
All of the above will ask for a server to connect to (naturally). You should specify the following: "peppar.cs.umu.se" -- or, in case that one fails, "salt.cs.umu.se". If both fail, send an e-mail to Support about it.
If you wish, you may create a folder called public_html in your user account. Anything placed there will be accessible via the Internet, if you point your browser to "http://www8.cs.umu.se/~yourusername/filename". So, if you have a picture called "me.jpg", if you place it in public_html and your user name would be "ens00abc", then you would be able to access it at "http://www8.cs.umu.se/~ens00abc/me.jpg".
Your solutions to the assignments should be placed in the appropriate sub directory in your home directory (the one that should automatically come up when you log in using the programs above), namely under your-home-directory/edu/5dv147/.Note that you should of course not upload your solutions to your public_html folder for the whole Internet to see (that could be considered attempted cheating).
It might be a good idea to upload your files once in a while to some folder that you create, simply because your home directory will be backed up daily. In computing, few things are worse than losing many days worth of data and hard work.
Of course, if you use SVN supplied by the department (which we really recommend), you can also feel safe, since those files are also backed up daily.
UNIX shell
Your user account also grants you shell access to our UNIX systems. If you are familiar with UNIX, go ahead and have fun, and if you are not, try looking for information on the Internet -- there is tons of information available.