ARCHIVED: Where can I find manuals for IUB's da Vinci SGI computers?

Note: Due to the decline in demand for Unix and Linux instruction at Indiana University Bloomington, effective at the end of spring 2007, no new Student Technology Center (STC) Unix accounts (i.e., Nations and da Vinci) will be created. For more information, see ARCHIVED: IUB STCs retiring Nations and da Vinci Unix labs. The functionality offered by these Unix clusters will continue to be available at the above locations, utilizing Windows and/or Macintosh STC workstations as well as other UITS resources.

At Indiana University Bloomington, you can access SGI technical manuals by logging into one of the workstations in the da Vinci cluster (Fine Arts 215).

Once you're logged in, do the following:

1. From the Toolchest, select Help, and then select Online Books.

   This will launch a program called launchbookviewer, which in turn will launch whatever program you have listed in your BOOKVIEWER environment variable. If you haven't chosen a viewer, it will launch a program called insight. For more information about using insight, consult the online help by pulling down the Help menu from the program window. To read a particular manual, double-click its picture in the display.

2. In insight, you will see a bookshelf containing all the books available on the system. You can read any of the available texts, and use special features such as keyword searches and bookmarks.

To see a wider selection of documentation, you can set your BOOKVIEWER variable to have the following value:

Then, when you choose Online Books (step 1, above), Netscape Navigator will launch and point to SGI's online technical publications library.

You can also find information about SGI systems in several Usenet newsgroups and a collection of FAQ files available online. For more information, see Where can I find information about Silicon Graphics (SGI) systems and software?

There are also Unix manual pages online, which you can display with the man command at the Unix shell prompt. For more information, see In Unix, what is the man command, and how do I use it to read manual pages?