How DICE Differs
This document highlights some differences between DICE and other unix environments
that new users may need to know about.
DICE is an infrastructure - not an operating system - and is
predominantly about providing a robust, easily manageable and
scalable system for Informatics. As such, it may well
not appear particularly different from what you
have been using before, being UNIX at the core.
But some users may notice some differences.
In particular you may not be familiar with the default X windowing
environment GNOME. Also, the default setup that you get on
starting up will be tailored over time, and may change.
You should be aware of the following areas:
- Kerberos password: Nobody will be able to
login without a Kerberos password. See your local computing
support person to get your Kerberos password.
- Students will have a university-wide username of the
form
s1234567.
- Staff will be allocated a unique university-wide username.
- Mailing lists
- To avoid clashes with the university-wide naming scheme, mailing list
names must be more than eight characters long, or contain a hyphen.
For example: <list-name>@inf.ed.ac.uk
- All mailing lists will be Mailman mailing lists.
- To find out about publishing pages on the Informatics Web server read the web section of the
Support FAQ
- laptops: we are not converting
DICE-suitable laptops to
being DICE-managed at the moment as there is additional work
remaining to be done.
- Your ~/.bashrc file will not be sourced.
Use ~/.benv instead. (More fully, ~/.brc
is sourced by every shell; ~/.benv is sourced by a shell starting
in a new environment (such as a remote login to a different machine); and
~/.bprofile is sourced when you first login.)
- The status of Teaching software is documented on
the DICE teaching
software pages. If the teaching software that you need isn't mentioned
then, please
contact us.
- Users who need to use some windows applications should read the
Support FAQ
