Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and How-Tos
The following provides useful information on common user questions and how to get things done generally and within the SCF environment. This is not a complete listing of all of our FAQ and How To pages. If you do not see a topic that you are interested in, please enter some search terms at the top right of this site.
Note that where we refer to UNIX, we mean our Linux servers and, in many cases, Macs when using the command line.
Logging in, accessing machines, and moving files around
- Changing your password
- Connecting remotely to SCF machines
- Using SSH to access a remote machine, managing SSH keys for password-less login, and using SSH tunnels
- Using the UNIX command line and the bash shell
- Copying files to and from your SCF account
- Mounting your SCF home directory on your personal machine
- Viewing grahical Linux programs on a Mac or PC via:
- Using the Globus browser-based data transfer service, particularly good for transferring a lot of data
- Authenticating to GitHub and other Git hosting services, including how to avoid re-entering your password
Email tips
- See the bMail knowledgebase for questions about bMail including forwarding and vacation responses.
- Departmental mailing lists
Website tips
- Setting up and using your personal website
- Editing your profile page on statistics.berkeley.edu
- (for staff) See the Website Guide in the Statistics General Office shared drive
Networking issues
- Connecting your personal computer to the department network
- Getting Wi-Fi Guest Access
- How do I create a WiFi account for eduroam (the UC Berkeley Wi-Fi network)?
- Working with WiFi Accounts
Printing
Computation
- Common computational problems on the system
- Running a program in the background (including the use of 'screen')
- Managing UNIX processes
- Running jobs on the Linux cluster
- Useful information about linear algebra (the BLAS), including speeding up calculations on your personal Mac
- Parallel programming tips
Software
- Installing software on ARM64-based Mac computers (Apple Silicon M1 and M2 Macs)
- Using LaTeX and the ucthesis LaTeX style
- Installing R packages
- C/C++ introduction, calling C/C++ from R, and creating R packages
- Using code chunks (and LaTeX) in documents with RStudio/RMarkdown/knitr and Jupyter notebooks
- Installing MATLAB
- Working with databases
- Hosting Shiny apps
The SCF filesystem, disk space, and backups
- Managing disk space, including temporary space and file compression
- Restoring deleted files from our tape backup
- Using Google Drive (bDrive)
- UNIX file permissions: how to allow or prevent other users from seeing your files
- Encrypting files in your home directory
- Hosting a Git repository on the SCF
Document manipulation and conversion
- Using code chunks (and LaTeX) in documents with RStudio/RMarkdown/knitr and Jupyter notebooks
- Merging PDF documents and extracting pages from PDF documents
- Converting LaTeX or HTML to Word or OpenOffice documents using pandoc (among other conversions)
- Manipulating PostScript files in Linux and converting PDF to PostScript
- Putting a figure into a Microsoft Word document
Miscellaneous R tips
- Saving Plots in R
- Reading Web Pages in R
- Dates and Times in R
- t-tests in R
- Using vectors and matrices in R
- Spell-checking in UNIX