Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

6.111 - Introductory Digital Systems Laboratory

Computer Information Revised January 10, 2003

You will need to use your Athena account in this subject. If you do not already have an Athena account, get one. If you have problems getting an Athena account, see the lecturer.

In the Digital Laboratory, we have several clusters of computers. Please do NOT use the PCs in the 6.115 area of the Digital Laboratory.

There are two PCs running Windows 98. These machines are NOT networked and run Universal (PAL, PLD, and PROM but NOT Cypress CPLDs) Programmers. One must put files on a floppy and carry the floppy to one of these machines (more on this in a later handout) in order to program devices. No 6.111 software can be run on them except for the programming software.

There are PCs running Athena Linux. Two of these PCs, pcpal2 and pcpal3, support programming of Cypress CPLDs (more on this in a later handout). Please only use pcpal2 or pcpal3 for programming Cypress CPLDs.

All of the other PCs running Athena Linux are named pali (i = 4 to 24). Most of these PCs run vmware which hosts a Windows 98 virtual machine on which the commercial software from Cypress and Altera runs. You can access your Athena locker from the Windows 98 virtual machine.

There are Sun Ultra 5 workstations named athpal0i (i = 1 to 5) and eecs-ath-33 (perhaps this last one will be renamed athpal06 sometime). All 6.111 software runs on these machines. Anyone (who has an Athena account) can slogin to one of the Ultra 5s (more on this later).

There are two Sparc 20s named sunpal1 and sunpal2 which run SunOS modified to be (almost) integrated with Athena. While you do not need to use these machines, you may. A local account and a local directory is automatically created when you respond to the login and password prompt with your Athena login name and password. When logged in to sunpal[12], your home directory will be

/students/<username>

Your Athena locker will appear as

/mit/<username>

and also as

/students/<username>/athena

via a symbolic link.

If you have logged in to sunpal[12] and have a local directory, then this home directory can be accessed on all Athena Sun Ultra 5s in the Digital Laboratory as

/students/<username>

There are two ways to run the Cypress or Altera commercial software. In the Digital Laboratory you can run the commercial software under Windows 98 under vmware or you can login to one of the Ultra 5s.

In either case, start out by executing:

setup 6.111 (do not use add 6.111 as this does not source /mit/6.111/.attachrc)

If you wish to use one of the Ultra 5s and you are not on the console of one of the Ultra 5s in the Digital Laboratory, then you can slogin to one of the Ultra 5s by executing:

ultra5 (this chooses the least used Ultra 5 and does an slogin there).

Then, on the (remote) Ultra 5 do

setup 6.111

To run the commercial software on one of the PCs running Athena Linux, execute

myvmware

then click on the Windows 98 configuration file and then click power on to start up the Windows 98 machine. Use the login name vmware and the password 6.111. Be sure to shut down Windows 98 and exit vmware before logging out of the Athena Linux machine.

The reason for using myvmware instead of vmware is that you must be in the passwd file when vmware is started in order to have access to the files in your AFS locker.

Please note that the number of workstations in the lab is limited. As a courtesy to other students do not attempt to reserve a machine by ``locking'' the screen. We are likely to reboot machines we find in this condition.

Printed January 14, 2003