Software in the DESY Environment

• Software in the DESY environment comes from various sources: The core software is installed on the local disk and executables can be found in the typical directories /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, and /usr/X11/bin. AFS-related software resides in /usr/afsws/bin and /usr/sue/bin, KDE applications (under DL5) are stored in /opt/kde3/bin. Many larger programs which are frequently used can be found in /opt/products/bin, some FLC-specific programs are installed in /group/bin. All (or most) of these directories should already be included in your predefined PATH. More software packages (sometimes in several versions) can be found under /opt/products and /group/opt – you can browse around and extend your PATH according to your needs. (If you encounter an “error while loading shared libraries”, you also have to adjust your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.) Other groups (or even individual people) may also offer software which is installed somewhere in the AFS, e. g. under /afs/desy.de/group/it/ilcsoft or /afs/desy.de/project/glite – ask your colleagues where that special software can be found.

• There are a couple of DESY-specific commands which are provided by the IT group and the FLC administrators. Some examples are:

  • phone – searches the DESY phonebook

  • today – shows a list of today’s events

  • inq – shows information about users (similar to finger)

  • ini – sets environment variables for the usage of certain software packages (only available in zsh and tcsh)

  • flcini – FLC-specific extensions to ini (see [:FLCComputingFlcini:the flcini command])

• Since a child process can never modify the environment variables of its parent, ini is not an executable but a shell function (or an alias in the case of tcsh) – that’s why it is shell-dependent.