This installation guide assumes that the user has at least a basic understanding of SunOS techniques and terminology. In this section we provide tips that the new user may find helpful. While the these tips are meant to clarify and assist users in installing and configuring the NVIDIA SunOS Driver, it is by no means a tutorial on the use or administration of the SunOS operating system. Unlike many desktop operating systems, it is relatively easy to cause irreparable damage to your SunOS system. If you are unfamiliar with the use of SunOS, we strongly recommend that you seek a tutorial through your distributor before proceeding.
While newer releases of SunOS bring new desktop interfaces to
the user, much of the work in SunOS takes place at the command
prompt. If you are familiar with the Windows operating system, the
SunOS command prompt is analogous to the Windows command prompt,
although the syntax and use varies somewhat. All of the commands in
this section are performed at the command prompt. Some systems are
configured to boot into console mode, in which case the user is
presented with a prompt at login. Other systems are configured to
start the X window system, in which case the user must open a
terminal or console window in order to get a command prompt. This
can usually be done by searching the desktop menus for a terminal
or console program. While it is customizable, the basic prompt
usually consists of a short string of information, one of the
characters #, $, or %, and a cursor
(possibly flashing) that indicates where the user's input will be
displayed.
SunOS has a hierarchical directory structure. From anywhere in the directory structure, the ls command will list the contents of that directory. The file command will print the type of files in a directory. For example,
% file filename
will print the type of the file filename. Changing directories is done with the
cd command.
% cd dirname
will change the current directory to dirname. From anywhere in the directory
structure, the command pwd will print the name of the current
directory. There are two special directories, . and .., which
refer to the current directory and the next directory up the
hierarchy, respectively. For any commands that require a file name
or directory name as an argument, you may specify the absolute or
the relative paths to those elements. An absolute path begins with
the "/" character, referring to the top or root of the directory
structure. A relative path begins with a directory in the current
working directory. The relative path may begin with . or ... Elements
of a path are separated with the "/" character. As an example, if
the current directory is /home/jesse
and the user wants to change to the /usr/local directory, he can use either of the
following commands to do so:
% cd /usr/local
or
% cd ../../usr/local
All files and directories have permissions and ownership
associated with them. This is useful for preventing
non-administrative users from accidentally (or maliciously)
corrupting the system. The permissions and ownership for a file or
directory can be determined by passing the -l option to the ls command. For example:
% ls -l drwxr-xr-x 2 jesse users 4096 Feb 8 09:32 bin drwxrwxrwx 10 jesse users 4096 Feb 10 12:04 pub -rw-r--r-- 1 jesse users 45 Feb 4 03:55 testfile -rwx------ 1 jesse users 93 Feb 5 06:20 myprogram -rw-rw-rw- 1 jesse users 112 Feb 5 06:20 README %
The first character column in the first output field states the file type, where 'd' is a directory and '-' is a regular file. The next nine columns specify the permissions (see paragraph below) of the element. The second field indicates the number of files associated with the element, the third field indicates the owner, the fourth field indicates the group that the file is associated with, the fifth field indicates the size of the element in bytes, the sixth, seventh and eighth fields indicate the time at which the file was last modified and the ninth field is the name of the element.
As stated, the last nine columns in the first field indicate the
permissions of the element. These columns are grouped into threes,
the first grouping indicating the permissions for the owner of the
element (jesse in this case), the
second grouping indicating the permissions for the group associated
with the element, and the third grouping indicating the permissions
associated with the rest of the world. The r, w, and
x indicate read, write and execute
permissions, respectively, for each of these associations. For
example, user jesse has read and
write permissions for testfile, users
in the group users have read
permission only, and the rest of the world also has read
permissions only. However, for the file myprogram, user jesse has read, write and execute permissions
(suggesting that myprogram is a
program that can be executed), while the group users and the rest of the world have no
permissions (suggesting that the owner doesn't want anyone else to
run his program). The permissions, ownership and group associated
with an element can be changed with the commands
chmod,
chown and
chgrp, respectively.
If a user with the appropriate permissions wanted to change the
user/group ownership of README from
jesse/users to joe/admin, he would do the following:
# chown joe README
# chgrp admin README
The syntax for chmod is slightly more complicated and has several variations. The most concise way of setting the permissions for a single element uses a triplet of numbers, one for each of user, group and world. The value for each number in the triplet corresponds to a combination of read, write and execute permissions. Execute only is represented as 1, write only is represented as 2, and read only is represented as 4. Combinations of these permissions are represented as sums of the individual permissions. Read and execute is represented as 5, where as read, write and execute is represented as 7. No permissions is represented as 0. Thus, to give the owner read, write and execute permissions, the group read and execute permissions and the world no permissions, a user would do as follows:
% chmod 750 myprogram
The shell provides an interface between the user and the
operating system. It is the job of the shell to interpret the input
that the user gives at the command prompt and call upon the system
to do something in response. There are several different shells
available, each with somewhat different syntax and capabilities.
The two most common flavors of shells used on SunOS stem from the
Bourne shell (sh) and
the C-shell (csh)
Different users have preferences and biases towards one shell or
the other, and some certainly make it easier (or at least more
intuitive) to do some things than others. You can determine your
current shell by printing the value of the SHELL environment variable from the command prompt
with
% echo $SHELL
You can start a new shell simply by entering the name of the shell from the command prompt:
% csh
or
% sh
and you can run a program from within a specific shell by preceding the name of the executable with the name of the shell in which it will be run:
% sh myprogram
The user's default shell at login is determined by whoever set up his account. While there are many syntactic differences between shells, perhaps the one that is encountered most frequently is the way in which environment variables are set.
Every session has associated with it environment variables,
which consist of name/value pairs and control the way in which the
shell and programs run from the shell behave. An example of an
environment variable is the PATH
variable, which tells the shell which directories to search when
trying to locate an executable file that the user has entered at
the command line. If you are certain that a command exists, but the
shell complains that it cannot be found when you try to execute it,
there is likely a problem with the PATH
variable. Environment variables are set differently depending on
the shell being used. For the Bourne shell (sh), it is done as:
% export MYVARIABLE="avalue"
for the C-shell, it is done as:
% setenv MYVARIABLE "avalue"
In both cases the quotation marks are only necessary if the value contains spaces. The echo command can be used to examine the value of an environment variable:
% echo $MYVARIABLE
Commands to set environment variables can also include
references to other environment variables (prepended with the "$"
character), including themselves. In order to add the path
/usr/local/bin to the beginning of
the search path, and the current directory . to the end of the search path, a user would
enter
% export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH:.
in the Bourne shell, and
% setenv PATH /usr/local/bin:${PATH}:.
in C-shell. Note the curly braces are required to protect the variable name in C-shell.
There are several text editors available for the SunOS operating
system. Some of these editors require the X window system, while
others are designed to operate in a console or terminal. It is
generally a good thing to be competent with a terminal-based text
editor, as there are times when the files necessary for X to run
are the ones that must be edited. Three popular editors are
vi,
pico and
emacs, each of which
can be started from the command line, optionally supplying the name
of a file to be edited. vi is arguably the most ubiquitous as
well as the least intuitive of the three. pico is relatively straightforward for a
new user, though not as often installed on systems. If you don't
have pico, you may
have a similar editor called nano. emacs is highly extensible and fairly
widely available, but can be somewhat unwieldy in a non-X
environment. The newer versions each come with online help, and
offline help can be found in the manual and info pages for each
(please see the section on SunOS Manual and Info pages). Many
programs use the EDITOR environment
variable to determine which text editor to start when editing is
required.
Upon installation, almost all distributions set up the default
administrative user with the username root. There are many things on the system that
only root (or a similarly
privileged user) can do, one of which is installing the NVIDIA
SunOS Driver. We must emphasize that
assuming the identity of root is
inherently risky and as root it is
relatively easy to corrupt your system or otherwise render it
unusable. There are three ways to become root. You may log in as root as you would any other user, you may use
the switch user command (su) at the command prompt, or, on some
systems, use the sudo
utility, which allows users to run programs as root while keeping a log of their actions. This
last method is useful in case a user inadvertently causes damage to
the system and cannot remember what he has done (or prefers not to
admit what he has done). It is generally a good practice to remain
root only as long as is necessary
to accomplish the task requiring root privileges (another useful feature of the
sudo utility).
It is good practice to install the NVIDIA SunOS Driver while X is not running.
To exit X Windows, logout and select the option "Command Line Login" at the login screen. This will stop the X server and start a text session. After this text session exits, the X server and the the graphical login screen are automatically restarted.
System manual or info pages are usually installed during
installation. These pages are typically up-to-date and generally
contain a comprehensive listing of the use of programs and
utilities on the system. Also, many programs include the
--help option, which usually prints a
list of common options for that program. To view the manual page
for a command, enter
% man commandname
at the command prompt, where commandname refers to the command in which you are
interested. Similarly, entering
% info commandname
will bring up the info page for the command. Depending on the
application, one or the other may be more up-to-date. The interface
for the info system is interactive and navigable. If you are unable
to locate the man page for the command you are interested in, you
may need to add additional elements to your MANPATH environment variable. Please see the section
on environment variables.