Installation and access

Author

Marie-Hélène Burle

In this section, we will make sure that you can access Emacs on our remote cluster.

Installing Emacs on your machine

To download and install Emacs on your computer, simply follow the instructions in the official documentation.

If you are on Linux, make sure to install the version of Emacs with native compilation and jansson support.

Native compilation was added as an option to Emacs 28 and greatly speeds up Emacs, in particular startup time. You will need libgccjit installed on your system.

Jansson support was added as an option to Emacs 27 and speeds up anything that involves JSON files and makes lsp-mode and eglot in particular much faster.

If you don’t use Linux, you will have to install libgccjit and the version of jansson for your OS (could be called libjansson), then compile Emacs from source with the --with-native-compilation and --with-json flags.

Accessing Emacs on the Alliance clusters

To ensure that we are all working in the same environment, for this course, we will use Emacs in a training cluster. This will also prepare you for using it on the Alliance clusters.

All you need to do is to log in to our cluster through SSH. Emacs is then available without having to load any module.

Windows users

Launch PowerShell and type ssh to see whether OpenSSH is installed and enabled on your system. If it is, follow the instructions for MacOS and Linux users below.

If it is not, install the free version of MobaXTerm and launch it, then follow the first 18% of this demo.

For “Remote host”, use the hostname we gave you.
Select the box “Specify username” and provide your username.

Note that the password is entered through blind typing, meaning that you will not see anything happening as you type it. This is a Linux feature. While it is a little disturbing at first, do know that it is working. Make sure to type it slowly to avoid typos, then press the “enter” key on your keyboard.

MacOS and Linux users

Open a terminal emulator:

  • MacOS users:   Launch Terminal.
  • Linux users:     Open the terminal emulator of your choice.

(For Windows users with ssh available in PowerShell, use PowerShell as the terminal emulator).

In it, run:

ssh <username>@<hostname>

Replace the username and hostname by their values.
For instance:

ssh user021@somecluster.c3.ca

You will be asked a question, answer “Yes”.

When prompted, type the password.

Note that the password is entered through blind typing, meaning that you will not see anything happening as you type it. This is a Linux feature. While it is a little disturbing at first, do know that it is working. Make sure to type it slowly to avoid typos, then press the “enter” key on your keyboard.

Troubleshooting

Problems logging in are almost always due to typos. If you cannot log in, retry slowly, entering your password carefully.

Now that you are logged in, in the next section, we will see how to launch Emacs.