Finding the terminal and remote shells

Guide to accessing the terminal

You will need to use the terminal in many cases in the future, most imminently for the next coming assignments in this course. (But you’ll need it in many future courses too). In this assignment you’ll ensure you have a terminal to use.

There are several options for accessing a UNIX-like terminal. We’ll cover

  1. running it on your own system,
  2. using a KTH system remotely.

On your own system

MacOS and Ubuntu (Linux): If you run Linux or MacOS, you’re already running a UNIX-like system (see the family tree). Then you can just start the terminal (just search for the word “terminal”). You can see the process in these videos:

Windows: On a Windows system it is a bit more complicated. While Windows also have a command-line interface, it’s not compatible with a UNIX-like interface. If you run Windows 10, just go ahead and install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to run Ubuntu in Windows. There are various guides:

Pick your favourite!

For older versions of Windows (or if you don’t want to/can’t install WSL), there is no really convenient option, you can

Old computers: Note that if you have an old computer that you perceive as slow, then it might be worth installing Ubuntu on it. After that the computer usually feels much faster again. See how to install Ubuntu. But make sure you don’t have any important data on that computer before you do anything, you might lose it depending on how you choose to install Ubuntu.

Use a KTH system remotely

Again, if you run a UNIX-like system, such as Linux, MacOS or WSL (on Windows 10 as above); then you can use the ssh command in the terminal to access a KTH system remotely. Just run

ssh dbosk@student-shell.sys.kth.se

with your KTH username instead of dbosk and your KTH password.

For verifying the key fingerprint when connecting the first time, you can find the official key fingerprints here.

The entire process will look something like this:

For Windows without WSL

If you run Windows without WSL (e.g. older than Windows 10), you’ll need PuTTY and WinSCP. PuTTY will open a terminal that’s running on KTH’s servers, just give student-shell.sys.kth.se as the hostname in PuTTY, something like this:

The PuTTY start-up screen

For verifying the key fingerprint when connecting the first time, you can find the official key fingerprints here.

Then you just type in your KTH username and password (note that you won’t see anything when typing in the password, UNIX-like systems don’t output the bullets or asterisks when typing passwords). It will look something like this:

WinSCP is used for copying files between the your local system and the remote KTH system. This allows you to upload or download files from your KTH home directory. As with PuTTY, just give student-shell.sys.kth.se as the hostname.

The end result

If you succeeded, you should have window that looks something like this (or the PuTTY window above):

A terminal window with an SSH session on a UNIX-like system

Assessment

We can see whether you’ve never logged into the student-shell server or not, so ensure that you successfully log in. Even if you’re sitting by a computer in one of the KTH labs, use ssh as above to log into student-shell.

By this, we assess that you can access the computer environment at KTH.