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B.1 A model user's home directory

A strength (and weakness) of the X window system is that it is infinitely configurable. Making reasonable use of it requires a number of files in the user's home directory. Usually, these files are hidden by giving them a name that begins with a period (.), such as
.xinitrc. You can see these files by listing your directory contents with the -a option:

ls -a
Even if you are new to Unix systems, with a new account, your system administrator will have put a number of such hidden files in your home directory when he or she sets up your account. Hopefully, these files have been chosen to give you reasonable behavior immediately. If not, however, this appendix can help you set up your account for running Ptolemy.

The home directory of your Ptolemy installation (either ~ptolemy or $PTOLEMY) is designed to serve as the home directory of a model user. We will refer to the directory by the name $PTOLEMY. Here is a listing of the contents of this directory:

% ls -a
./			.cshrc			.twmrc
../			.login			.xsession
.Xdefaults			.plan
This user is configured according to the tastes of the authors of Ptolemy. To configure your own account to behave the same way, you can copy all the dot files (hidden files whose names begin with a period) from the directory $PTOLEMY into your home directory. Unless you are a new user, however, you will probably not want to overwrite features already defined in your own dot files. In this case, you will need to extract the features you desire from the dot files in $PTOLEMY and add them to your own. To make this easy to do, we explain below the salient features of each of these files.



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