Setting up your environment

SSH: Log into other computers. A lot of information on how to set up "password-less" logins.

Physics programmes of interest

This section is of less general interest. It focuses on programmes that are useful for particle physics, theoretical cosmology and GR. It is also biased towards Unix users, particularily MacOSX users. Other pages that are similar are:

General programmes

LaTeX

You can get LaTeX for many different platforms and can be obtained at the following locations:

TeXShop for Mac OSX
TeX Live is a distribution for any major Unix system and Windows.
MikTeX for Windows systems

Note that LaTeX is available by default on the student.physics.ucdavis.edu machines. Useful (and free) guides for learning LaTeX are available all over the web. My favourite guide for beginners is The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e.

If you want to use presentation software such as Keynote or Powerpoint, but want to have LaTeX-quality equations, you should consider using

LaTeXIT: my preferred choice (PPC and Intel Macs). Very fancy.
LaTeX equation editor: Not as polished as LaTeXIt, but still does the job.

Extending LaTeX can be a headache. Read more.

XCode (OS X only)

XCode is the name for the set of OS X Developer tools. It includes the C (C++) compiler gcc (g++), an IDE and many libraries that are essential for compiling open source programmes used in physics. A full description of what is used in XCode can be found here. (Note: no download from that page!)

There is no quick link from the description above to the location for downloading XCode. You will need to sign up for a free Apple Developer Connection (ADC) account, which requires handing over an e-mail address to them.

GNUplot

A general purpose plotter, with a fairly simple interface. Available at www.gnuplot.info. Example plots are shown below:

Note: the one on the right is not mine! Click for a larger image.

One of the best advantages of GNUplot over (say) mathematica or maple graphs is that it is incredibly easy to write scripts to automatically create graphs for you from raw data.

Editors

Fink: The world of open source on your mac! (OS X only)

Particle physics programmes

SHERPA: A Monte-Carlo event generator

SHERPA is a Monte-Carlo generator for various standard model events. It comes with the standard model, the MSSM and some extra dimension models built in. You can obtain SHERPA here. Note that this site does not work in Safari, although it works fine with Firefox.

Getting SHERPA to work with OS X is not straightfoward (at least, as of version 1.0.9). To get it to work, you must:

Install libtool from GNU. The default apple version does not work!
Edit the file ATOOLS-2.0.9/ORG/Exception_Handler.C to edit out Line 6:
//#define USING_Stack_Trace <-- comment this out or compile will fail!
This version of Sherpa is still confused about which library files to look for. It won't compile unless it can find files named libXXX.so, but won't run unless it can find libXXX.dylib. To fix this either run
> ln -s libXXX.dylib libXXX.so
for every library in SHERPA-1.0.9/Run/(Process in question)/Process/lib or run the perl script makeso in the same directory.

Root: An analysis package

Root is a toolkit for trying to extract physics from common observables at acclerators. It is commonly used with simulated data to look at how much of a signal you could get for a proposed physics model by comparing it with a (more-or-less) known background. It is also useful for experimentalists to get an idea of how well a particular analysis technique will work.

This links to the root home page, and the downloads are available here.