You have a unique “username”, or “login name”, which identifies you to the computer. You don’t get to make one up—somebody created one for you.
If you’re lucky, and you’re the only person with your last name taking a computer class, then your login name will just be your last name. However, if more than one person has the same last name, then one of you will have some extra letters.
If your last name doesn’t work, try your last name and the first letter of your first name, or your last name with the initials from your first and middle names. Login names are limited to eight letters, so if your last name is long, try making it shorter.
For example, if your name is Barack Hussein Obama, you should try:
obama (just the last name)
obamab (last name and first initial)
obamaba (last name, part of first name)
obamabh (last name, first initial, middle initial)
barack (it’s an unusual name—worth a try)
On the other hand, if your last name is long, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, try:
rooseve (last name truncated to seven letters)
roosevel (last name truncated to eight letters)
roosevef (last name truncated to seven letters, first initial)
roosevfd (last name truncated to six letters, first initial, middle initial)
If none of those work, send email to your instructor asking for your
login name, or ask a lab op on duty to finger you:
finger roosevelt
What do I mean by “work”? I mean that both the username and the password have to be right. If you get the username wrong, it doesn’t tell you “bad username”; it still asks you for a password. Honest! This is a security thing, so a bad guy can’t easily find out what usernames are valid.
Your password is your CSU ID. It’s a nine-digit number starting with 8, with no dashes or other punctuation. You should change it. If you’ve taken a Computer Science class recently, you may still have a login left over from that class. If so, your password will still be whatever it was from that class.
You don’t have to use the same computer every time. Your files are magically on all of the CS Department computers at once.
corn, you must refer
to it as corn.cs.colostate.edu.
To create a shell window:
gnome-terminal enter
Alt is like the shift key. Hold down the Alt key, to the left of the space bar, and press F2, which is way high up, above the 3 key. Then let go of both keys.
To get rid of the shell window:
exit or click on the × in the upper-right corner.
firefox enter
Once you log in, you should change your password using the
passwd command. Get a terminal window by right-clicking
in the background and selecting “Open Terminal”. When the prompt
appears, change your password like this:
passwd
You can read your mail with a web interface at
http://webmail.cs.colostate.edu, if you remember to do that,
or you can forward your mail to your non-CSU email address by creating
a .forward file in your home directory:
echo "SamStudent@gmail.com" >~/.forward