CSE 481D: Capstone Software Design - Spring 2007

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Course Lab Location

We have (exclusive) use of Sieg 324. This is an incredibly great situation:

• It's above ground.
• It's all ours (so occasional noise is no problem).
• It's a single place, so will encourage you to work in physical proximity to each other. (It turns out that is really important -- it's surprisingly hard to make progress if working in separate locations, even using technology like IM. This is especially true at the beginning, end, and middle of the course.)
• It's right down the hall from the animation class lab and classroom (and the entire animation scene is way cool).

Entry is by card key. If you have problems getting in, let me know.

Course Lab Systems

The short-term plan is to have about a dozen quad-core machines, donated by Intel, supplemented by a few dual-core machines. Nearly all will run Linux, which is our standard build environment. We will also run a couple Windows systems, so that we can (a) use tools that are available only on Windows or are more convenient to use there, and (b) do some testing on Windows.

The entire lab is firewalled, which is a pre-requisite to our having root access to the machines, which is prerequisite to getting anything done in reasonable time that involves installing new packages. A side effect of this (having root access) is that no filesystems are exported to the lab machines -- you won't find the usual paths, like /cse/courses/.... You'll have to access remote machines using ssh and the like, in the rare instance that access is required.

To acquire root privilege, say sudo, or maybe sudo bash. To release root privilege type ctrl-d.

That's the short-term plan (ETA about April 11). At the moment there are about a dozen dual-core machines running the Windows. Unfortuately, we can't login to any of them, for reasons noted above. We'll be fixing this problem pronto.

Location of Course Files

svn Repository

At the moment, there is a single repository for the entire class. It is currently at best read-only. ("At best" because until Unix groups are set up you might not even be able to checkout any files.) The svn repository is accessed using a URL like this: svn+ssh://attu.cs.washington.edu/projects/instr/cse481/07sp/svn There are three useful directory trees there: apps, libs, and games The first has tools that might be of use, the second has libraries that we need but are part of the standard FC6 install, and the third is where our games go. At present, build of the game (BubbleWar) works only on Linux. You make a working (local) copy of one of the subtrees like this: svn co svn+ssh://attu.cs.washington.edu/projects/instr/cse481/07sp/svn/trunk/games which will create directory games on the local machine. At the moment, this results in 275MB on the local machine. (Lab Windows machines have TortoiseSVN installed. Command line svn may or may not be installed in cygwin.) Other things you might want to check out: svn+ssh://attu.cs.washington.edu/projects/instr/cse481/07sp/svn/trunk/readmes svn+ssh://attu.cs.washington.edu/projects/instr/cse481/07sp/svn/trunk/libs/ogre svn+ssh://attu.cs.washington.edu/projects/instr/cse481/07sp/svn/trunk/libs/ode-0.8 Note: The libs driectory contains ogre, ode, RakNet, and CEGUI, among other thigns. You can find examples and documentation there. Note: Fetching all three main directories results in something big, and transfers a lot of data -- at least 500MB, and maybe as much as 3.6GB (it's a little hard to tell to know what is on the wire).

Groups / Permissions

You'll acquire at least one new group, which will allow you to access and update the svn repository and other shared space.

Software / Policies

The CSE 481 lab is run differently than all other labs. The Windows boxes are never re-imaged, so you can install things and they stay installed. (It also means if a machine is corrupted it stays corrupted until someone tells support about it -- tell support about it.) You can acquire root on the Linux boxes using sudo.

Note: The local drives on the lab machines are never backed up.