The following instructions are dependent on the computer you are using to connect to the coelinux host. This is just an outline of various ways in which you can connect to coelinux and execute commands or transfer files. You may need to get additional information specific to your computer to complete these steps (search the Internet or ask for help on MS Teams).
Connect to COE VPN with Ivanti
To be able to connect to the College of Engineering network it is necessary to first establish a secure connection using the Ivanti Secure VPN client. In other words, for any of the steps outlined below to work, you must always first open a connection to the COE VPN using the Ivanti VPN client. Instructions on how to download and install the Ivanti Secure VPN client and how to connect to the COE VPN are available here.
Logging into your coelinux account
Option 1—Connect with a terminal application
See these instructions on how to connect to coelinux with ssh from various platforms.
Option 2–Connect with FastX
Instructions on how to download and install FastX and how to use it to connect with coelinux are available here
When asked for the Host, enter coelinux.coeit.osu.edu, and when asked to "Select your desired desktop environment from the list", you can either select MATE, if you want a full desktop (and then open a terminal window by clicking on the small terminal button in the toolbar at the top of the window) or xterm for just a terminal window.
Transferring files to your coelinux account
Option 1: Transfer with an SFTP application
FileZilla is a free SFTP client available for most systems (Windows, macOS, Linux). You can download FileZilla from https://filezilla-project.org/ and connect to your coelinux account using coelinux.coeit.osu.edu as the host, your OSU credentials, and port 22. You can then transfer files between your local file system and your folder on coelinux.
Option 2: Transfer with email and browser
Email the file(s) to an email account you can access through a web interface (e.g., BuckeyeMail or GMail). Connect to coelinux with FastX. Run a browser from a terminal with one of the following commands (including the &):
firefox &
google-chrome &
Open your email from the browser and save the email attachment to a local file.
A few useful commands for coelinux
The file system on coelinux contains files and folders. Folders are also called directories. At all times when you are working in a terminal window, one of these directories is the current directory. When you first log in, the current directory is your home directory. You can see the name of the current directory and the path to it by giving the print-working-directory command:
pwd
You can change which directory is current by using the change-directory command, providing as the argument a relative or absolute path to the directory desired:
cd Desktop
The command above gives a relative path. It works if there is a directory named Desktop in the current directory. Your home directory has a directory named Desktop in it. To return to the parent directory of the new current directory, you can use the special relative path .. as the argument:
cd ..
To quickly get back to your home directory from anywhere, you can use the special (relatively) absolute path ~ as the argument:
cd ~
To see the (non-"hidden"") members of a folder (i.e., directory), you can list them:
ls
To see detailed information about the (non-"hidden") members of a folder, you can request a long listing (the option after the - is a lower case el):
ls -l
You can also see all members of a folder:
ls -a
You can combine these requests:
ls -al
A truly absolute path begins with /. As we saw earlier, a relative path does not begin with /. Not that you need to, and only if you know how to get back to your home directory, you could change your current directory using an absolute path. For example,
cd /share/SCE/class/software/bin
Finally, if you want to edit a text file you can use the gedit editor:
gedit &
Note: this requires a connection with "X11 forwarding" (if you want to know more about this, feel free to look for more information on the web; for now, suffices to say that this will work out-of-the-box with a FastX connection).