Lab 0: Instructor's Notes
Your students will need to be informed about the following issues
before they are able to complete this exercise:
-
How is a computing session initiated at your institution?
(e.g., must students turn on the machine? log on? give a password?
change their password? etc.)
-
What environment-specific details do they need to know about your
institution? (e.g., are they using dumb terminals? X-Window
terminals? stand-alone workstations? etc.)
-
Must students do anything special to print hard copies at your
institution? (e.g., name the printer, pick up hard copies at
a different location, etc.)
-
How is a computing session terminated at your institution?
(e.g., must they log out, turn the machine off? etc.)
-
Which of the four projects do you wish them to do as homework
when they have completed the lab exercise?
The exercise assumes that GNU C++ (g++) and that xemacs
(available via gnu.org
and xemacs.org, respectively)
are correctly installed on your system.
The older emacs text editor can be used in place of xemacs,
but xemacs is much nicer to use than emacs, and
you'll be serving your students well by upgrading to xemacs.
That said, this exercise teaches the emacs and xemacs keyboard commands,
rather than the GUI features of xemacs.
The reason is to teach the students what they need to know in order to
use emacs or xemacs outside of the X-window system
(e.g., via a terminal or telnet session from their dorm room).
In our experience, students who have mastered the keyboard commands
can easily pick up how to use the xemacs GUI interface by experimentation;
but students who first learn the GUI interface have more difficulty
mastering the keyboard commands.
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Forward to the Prelab Questions
Copyright 1998 by
Joel C. Adams. All rights reserved.