17th FLUKA Course

Requirements

Requirements

Prior to the course we encourage you having a certain 'basic' knowledge of Linux. Below you'll find a first selection of useful/needed commands and for those of you still feeling a bit uneasy with the use of Linux, we kindly ask you to have a closer look, as well as possibly follow related Linux tutorials which are available on the network: Linux tutorial

Furthermore, those of you bringing their own laptop are kindly requested to verify the proper functioning of FLUKA & FLAIR, at least in terms of software requirements (gcc, Python, gnuplot, etc...).

Chapter 1:
Hardware and Software requirements:

For the moment FLUKA does not support Windows and Mac, thus even though one could envisage running through X-window connections (such as Exceed, Putty, VNC,...) we do not encourage doing so for the course. Course participants intending to use their own laptop need a working LINUX system installed. We encourage everybody to check if their LINUX system contains all elements listed below, as well as their correct functioning:

required package	version required	how to verify? (type in terminal)
Fortran g77/gcc or gfortran/gcc	3.0 or higher 4.6 or higher	g77 -v gfortran -dumpversion
Python (with Tkinter and Tk/Tcl)	Python: 2.3 or higher (but not V3.+) Tk/Tcl: 8.3 or higher	Python: python -V Tkinter: type: python in terminal and then type: import Tkinter If you get error messages you don't have Tkinter installed. Type Ctrl-D to exit the python interpreter.
For the interactive geometry visualization	python-devel tk-devel	Depending on the distribution can have the names python-dev, python-devel, tk-dev, tk-devel, tk-dev85 etc..
gnuplot	4.0 or higher (4.2 or higher recommended)	Type: gnuplot -V on the command line. This will print the gnuplot version.
PDF reader		Anything which reads PDF files (Acrobat Reader, xpfd, kpdf etc.)

If your computer does not fulfill all the requirements above please ask your local system administrator for help or contact us in advance.

Chapter 2:
Computing skills (LINUX) required for the FLUKA course:

In the course LINUX will be used as operating system and we strongly encourage that you are familiar with the main basic shell commands - ideally already before the course.

The following is needed for the course:

• opening a terminal (depends on your distribution, on most systems there is an icon on the Desktop or in the taskbar of the desktop environment, or it can be found somewhere in the start menu)
• being able to work with a text editor (Emacs, nedit, gedit, kate, vim, vi, joe etc.) to create, edit and save files

Knowledge of the following Linux commands:

command	meaning	syntax
cat	list the contents of short files to the screen	cat
cd	change the current working directory	cd starting from root directory: cd /home move to parent directory: cd .. move to user directory: cd ~
cp	copy the file; will overwrite destination if exists	cp prompt before overwrite: cp -i copy file to current directory: cp . copy whole directory and all its contents: cp -r
grep	search for a string in file(s)	grep search recursively in whole directory: grep -r example: grep "fluka" report.txt
less	displays the contents of the file (user can scroll up/down)	less
ls	list files	ls list all files with a lot of info: ls -al
man	get detailed information how to use particular command; press SHIFT+Z twice to exit	man
mkdir	create a directory	mkdir
mv	move or rename file	mv
pwd	show the name of the current working directory
rm	remove command	removes a file: rm removes all files in current directory except subdirs: rm * removes directory with all its contents: rm -r
rmdir	remove dir if empty	rmdir
tar	tool for (de)compress file(s)	example: tar -xvf archive.tar tar -xzf archive.tar.gz to create an archive from directory: tar -czf archive.tar.gz
touch	create file	touch

Environment variables:

Environment variables are 'placeholders' used in the shell holding 'strings'. In this course we will use them to set the variable FLUPRO which defines the path to the directory where FLUKA is installed. Depending on the shell used (bash, tcsh ...) one has to use different commands setenv or export. To access the name of the variable one has to put a $ in front of the name, $FLUPRO in this case. An example:
on tcsh:

setenv FLUPRO /path/to/FLUKA

on bash:

export FLUPRO=/path/to/FLUKA

To see if the variable is set correctly set one can print its content by:

echo $FLUPRO

This should print /path/to/FLUKA