• To access Scholar from off-campus, there are multiple possibilities:
  • Use Jupyter Notebooks
  • Use the ThinLinc web client
  • Setup a VPN connection and then use the ThinLinc client application on your computer
• If the font in your RStudio application looks strange (e.g., the mouse/cursor does not match the place where you are typing), you can fix this as follows:
  • Open RStudio
  • In the Tools menu, choose Global Options
  • Choose the Appearance tab
  • Select the Monospace font in the Editor font menu
  • Click the Apply button
• If your RStudio is taking a long time to open, it is possible that you saved a large .RData file the last time that you closed your RStudio. (It is OK to avoid saving the .RData file, for this reason.) If you did save your .RData file, and you want to remove it now, you can do the following:
  • It is worthwhile to close RStudio
  • Open the File Manager (it is located in the dock, and looks like a filing cabinet)
  • Select your home directory (Dr Ward's is called "mdw", for instance)
  • You need to see the "hidden files", which you can do by pressing Control-H or by choosing View / Show Hidden Files in the menu at the top of the File Manager window
  • Drag your .RData file to the Trash
  • Click on the Trash and then choose File / Empty Trash from the File Manager window, and then click "Empty Trash" to confirm that you want to empty the Trash
• If you want to upload/download a file (for instance, from your email) to the server, there are more sophisticated things that you can do, but sometimes it is helpful to simply use a browser. Remember that you have a browser on the server itself! It is located in the dock, and the icon looks like a blue-and-green picture of the globe.
• If you accidentally selected "one empty panel" when you first logged into Scholar, so you do not have any menus in Scholar, you can fix this as follows:
  • Open a terminal (which is hard because there are no menus in this case) by clicking on the "Home" icon (which looks like a house). This opens a window in the File Manager. Then choose:
    File > Open Terminal Here
    from the menu in that window.
  • Type (EXACTLY!!) the following in the terminal:
          cp    /etc/xdg/xfce4/panel/default.xml    ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-panel.xml
  • Log out of Scholar. This is hard without menus. I have been telling students to do it this way, although there might be some type of more gentle solution. Type in the terminal:
    killall -9 -u [PUT USERNAME HERE]
    for example I would type:
    killall -9 -u mdw
    
  • This will kill the session (obviously) and then when students log back in, the menu system will work properly.
• If your Firefox window will not open inside Scholar, try these steps:
  • Open your File Browser in Scholar. Choose the Option "View > Show Hidden Files". Then, inside your home directory, throw away the directory .mozilla. Then your Firefox should load.
• If you want to run a line of code in R, you can click anywhere on the line (you do not need to highlight the line, and you do not need to click at the start of end of the line; anywhere on the line is OK). You type the "Control" and "Return" keys together, to run that line.
• If your R session freezes, it is OK to log out of Scholar, and then log back in to Scholar using the ThinLinc client. Before entering your password in ThinLinc, be sure to click on the "End Existing Session" option in the ThinLinc window (to the left of where you type your password). This will reset your Scholar session.