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
- Copying files to and from your SCF account
- Mounting your SCF home directory on your personal machine
- Viewing graphical Linux programs on a Mac or PC
- 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
- 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
- Using Spark for distributed MapReduce and related computations
- Cloud computing tips
- Software
- 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
- Miscellaneous R tips
- Spell-checking in UNIX
- The SCF filesystem, disk space, and backups
- 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 tips