Many of the labs and projects can be worked on remotely, outside of the EWS labs. There are two ways of doing this; by connecting remotely to EWS systems over the Internet, or using your own computer.

Technical difficulties encountered while trying to connect remotely are not acceptable as an excuse for failing to submit an assignment or for turning in an assignment late!

Please refer to EWS Remote Connections for detailed instructions on how to access EWS lab machines remotely. Here we provide a brief overview of some of the options you may find suitable to your needs.

Connecting to the EWS server remotely:

For the software Labs, you need to have access to our EWS server. Please make sure that you can work on the EWS server remotely. Follow the following guidelines to connect to the EWS server. For more information, please see the following links:

https://answers.uillinois.edu/illinois.engineering/page.php?id=81727

https://it.engineering.illinois.edu/keeplearning

There are two primary ways of connecting remotely, through FastX or SSH.

FastX (recommended at the beginning of the semester)

Running FastX in your browser is like virtually sitting in front of a computer in the EWS lab. Follow the instructions in Engineering IT's FastX Guide (also, see the Guidelines below)

Guidelines:

Students can use Engineering IT's FastX service for remote access to Linux applications. This service can be rapidly scaled to handle a much larger number of concurrent connections as needed.

Connecting with FastX
VPN (Required for FastX)

VPN

The campus VPN is required to use many on-campus services. The Tech Services' VPN Essentials link below provides guidance on what applications need VPN connections. Once connected, you could also directly connect to file storage and other systems on campus, allowing you to do many school tasks remotely. Unlike the remote desktop option however, you are limited to software that is installed on the laptop or offsite desktop computer.

VPN Essentials

A quick tutorial to set up FastX (VPN_Fastex_setup.pdf)

SSH

SSH stands for Secure SHell. When you connect to a machine with SSH, you get access to a terminal on that machine that allows you to work on the command line.

Mac OS X, Linux

On a Unix machine you can create a remote command line by opening up a terminal on your computer and running the "ssh" program like so:

ssh netid@linux.ews.illinois.edu

Where netid is your netid. To disconnect from the remote machine, simply run "exit". This will only give you terminal access, so you won't be able to launch GUI applications. This may not be as big of a problem as you might think, see "Dumping the GUI" section below.

If you can't live without a GUI, you can probably enable it with something called "X forwarding". Add the -Y flag to your ssh invocation like so:

ssh -Y netid@linux.ews.illinois.edu

If X forwarding is successful, you should be able to run GUI applications.

X11 forwarding over SSH on macOS requires a program called XQuartz

Windows

On a Windows machine, you can get an SSH client called PuTTY . When you run it, use your netid as your username, and "linux.ews.illinois.edu" as the hostname. If everything goes well, you'll have a terminal on an EWS machine. Type "exit" to disconnect. The default install of PuTTY only provides command line access but it can be extended to run GUI applications to handle X11 forwarding. This can be done by installing a program called XMing and following the instructions listed here. If you choose not to use XMing, the next section provides some alternatives to GUI applications.

Working Remotely with Visual Studio Code (link)

Dumping the GUI

As you become more familiar with the command line, you'll discover that many of the things that you used to need a GUI for can be done on the command line. In fact, in this course, everything can be done on the command line since all the graphical tools you might use have command line equivalents. Using the command line has a number of advantages: more power, more flexibility, and simplicity.

gedit: nano is a command line based text editor that provides similar functionality. Info about it can be found on the Unix Command Line page.

vim: a command line based text editor with rich functionalities. Once you become familiar with it, editting in vim could be much faster than editting in a GUI. There is a fun game you could play to get familiar with its keys.

lc3sim-tk: lc3sim is the command line equivalent to the graphical simulator.

Working on your own machine

Despite the recommendation to use EWS systems, you may want the independence that comes with working on your own machine. To do this, you'll need to install the programs that we use in this course on your own machine.

First of all, if you're running Windows, you'll find things a bit more challenging. This is because Windows likes to be different from all of the other operating systems, which means by itself, it won't be able to run the programs used in this class. Luckily, there's a program called Cygwin which provides a Unix environment inside of Windows.

Text editing

Linux: Gedit will work here
Mac OS X: Xcode is a nice text editor
Windows: Notepad++ is the recommended text editor. Do not use MS word, notepad, Wordpad as these programs format text files in ways that can break programs used in this class. See Coding Conventions for more info.

In addition to the above GUI text editors, you can use command line editors on Unix/Cygwin:

nano: Easiest to use
emacs: Has every feature imaginable
vim: Steep learning curve, but powerful

Subversion

Windows: TortoiseSVN : Easy to use subversion client.
Mac OS X, Linux: The command line version of "svn" is probably already installed. You use it just like you would on the EWS machines.
Cygwin: you'll need to go to the Cygwin software installation menu to install SVN.

lc3tools

You can run these on Unix-like systems (Mac OS X, Linux, and Cygwin). See Installing LC-3 tools on your machine -.

Comments

If you have any suggestions or tips about working remotely, post them in the ECE120 Discord so that others can benefit!