Lab Software

If you need any further explanations or help with the computer lab software, call ATUS at x3333 for assistance.

Web Browsers
Mozilla Firefox is an open-source and free web browser, offering an excellent and arguably more secure alternative to Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer (or IE for short) is Microsoft’s web browser. This comes default on most computers and is the most widely used browser. If you’re looking for something different, try Firefox.
Office Suites
Microsoft Word composes and formats letters, faxes, and documents.
Microsoft Excel is a powerful spreadsheet program useful for organizing large sets of data.
Microsoft Powerpoint is an easy-to-use slideshow making program commonly used to accent presentations.
OpenOffice roughly has the power to do anything Microsoft Office can do, only OpenOffice is free. Open it up and experiment with it’s interface, it’s only slightly different.
Multi-media
Windows Media Player views many types of online audio/video. The three main media players are Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, and RealOne.
QuickTime is Apple’s media player. It is essential for playing online QuickTime files and streaming video.
RealOne player views online streaming video and audio.
Remote Connection
The Novell Client allows users to connect to their network drives across campus, such as the U:, J:, and S: drive. The U: drive is your personal file space. When a user logs in, drives are automatically mapped as if they were connected to the local machine. This icon is quick access to the login screen so that different users can log in without having to shut down all the programs and log in as a different user. WARNING: If you are working on a document from your personal U: drive and someone else logs in, your connection to the U: drive will be lost and you could lose data. Make sure you are not connected to any files before you log on as another user using this login screen.
Remote Desktop connects to Windows XP computers and displays the screen of that computer as if you were sitting down in front of it. You must have an account on the computer you wish to remotely connect to.
PuTTY securely connects to Linux/UNIX terminals using SSH. Back in the day, telnet was the only way to check your western email. You can still check your mail this way using SSH as the secure protocol to connect to Titan. To try it out, open up PuTTY, double click on the Titan saved session, and login with your usual universal login and password. At the prompt, you can do all kinds of cool Unix commands as well as type “pine” (without quotes) to get the old-school way to check your email. Pine help can be found here.
Like Remote Desktop, VNC allows people to view the graphical desktop of another machine remotely. The computer you connect to must have the VNC server running and you must know its security password to connect.
File Transfer
WinSCP securely connects to a Linux/Unix computer to transfer files.
WsFTP is a commonly used File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client. If you don’t care which FTP client you use, FileZilla may be a little easier to use and more feature-rich.
FileZilla provides a feature-rich and fairly easy-to-use FTP interface. Open ‘er up and take a crack at it!
Utilities
Adobe Acrobat views electronic documents which typically end with a .pdf extension.
Cygwin mimics the command line environment of Linux. Most people will have little practical use for this program unless you are familiar with the Linux command-line environment. Linux is cool though, so open it up and give a shot at some wicked sweet Linux commands.
EditPlus is a shareware HTML Editor and programmer-friendly text editor. It color codes HTML code to make programming easier to view and work with.
The GIMP is and acronym for The GNU Image Manipulation Program. According to their website, “GIMP is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.” It has similar features to Adobe Photoshop only it costs $649 less, giving it a nice, affordable price of $0.