Computing Support Group

The Meteorology System Support Group is Bret Whissel, System Administrator (408 Love), Kelly Hirai (409 Love), and Bob Broedel, Hardware Support (025 Love). If you have problems with networking or departmental computing systems, come see us or send e-mail to .

Meteorology personnel acquire accounts by filling out a Computer Account Request Form. Leave completed forms in the System Administrator's department mailbox in 410 Love.

You'll find an introduction to Meteorology computer-related procedures and policies, and a brief introduction to using UNIX in the document UNIX You Need to Know. Meteorology subscribes to the campus Information Technology Resource Usage policy. You should also note our own Lab and Classroom Rules.

FSUthesis Class and LaTeX Resources

For graduate students who are starting work on their thesis or dissertation, the FSUthesis Class for LaTeX has been written to provide a LaTeX document type that meets the standards of the FSU Graduate School.

You may download the ZIP package from the GradSpace area on Blackboard, or you may get the latest version listed below. (Bret Whissel, EOAS/Meteorology SysAdmin, wrote and maintains this package for the FSU community.)

• Latest FSUthesis Class package

LaTeX is a document system which excels at producing mathematics and beautifully typeset manuscripts. Distributions are widely available for Windows, Mac, and UNIX/Linux environments.

• MikTeX: TeX and LaTeX for Windows
• MacTeX: TeX and LaTeX for Mac
• TeXLive: TeX and LaTeX for UNIX/Linux

If you are new to LaTeX, you can get up and running quickly with The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e, which covers all the basics. There are many books on the subject as well. Browse through Amazon.com to find the reference that meets your needs.

Additional Resources for Home Computing

If you want to log in to departmental computers from a remote location, there are several options available. If you only need shell access to your home directory in the department, then a simple Secure SHell (SSH) client is all that's required. Most Linux/Unix distributions will probably have a secure shell client installed already.

For this, see openssh.org. In the menu column on the left-hand side under ``Alternatives'', click on the Windows or MacOS links for options. For Windows, PuTTY is probably what you want. For Mac, the MacSSH option provides the proper support (SSH2 is the preferred protocol).

To do more processing on your own computer at home without having to to log in to departmental computers, you can download software available for free. What you need to download depends on your platform. For Mac users, many utilities have already been ported to run natively. You'll find many packages available through MacPorts or Fink.

For Windows users, the Cygwin project provides many useful utilities, including an X-window server, SSH, and even Fortran compilers. Find Cygwin at cygwin.com. Download the setup.exe program and follow the installation instructions found on the website. Cygwin's setup program is a package manager, and you run it whenever you want to install or remove programs or features. To install the SSH client, run the Cygwin setup program, search for the ``openssh'' package, and select it. To install a Fortran compiler, select the ``gcc4-fortran'' package. Some packages depend on other packages, so when you select one of these options, several other packages may be downloaded and installed as well.

If you want to install an X-Window environment for running graphical packages from a remote site, you should read the documentation and installation instructions on the Cygwin/X site which has much more complete information.