• Bash scripts and tools for running experiments
• Latex

There are several useful tools for running experiments. Also, since you will be running experiments on your VM, you may want to run your virtualbox in non-GUI mode (see the virtual box guide for how to do this), using screen to remotely attach and detach from it.

In addition, you will likely want to write some bash scripts and maybe use script and dos2unix to run a large set of experiments.

You can try out a couple example bash scripts that I have. In your cs45/weeklylabs subdirectory, copy over my bash script examples directory:

cd cs45/weeklylabs/
mkdir bash_examples
cd bash_examples
cp -r ~newhall/public/bashscript_examples .

See my tools for running experiments for more information and links to resources (screen, script, bash scripts).

If you want to try out latex for writing your lab 4 report, take a look at my latex documentation and examples: latex (this link also has documentation about graph and figure creating and editing tools on our system).

Below are some latex examples for papers that you can copy these over and use as a starting point for your report (I recommend using the fist one). Read the README files to see how to build, view, and clean-up .pdf and other generatd files, and note that there is a Makefile that contains commands to build and clean-up to make this very easy (always use a Makefile):

• A research paper/report example is in this directory:

  /home/newhall/public/latex_examples/paper/
  

  You can specify either a one or two column version of this in the top line in example.tex. It contains examples of figures and tables in latex, including how to get them to span columns in the two-column version of this document, as well as general title and section formatting for this type of document.

  Note: I just made a lot of changes to this, so if you copied this last week you may want to grab a new version of examples.tex that has my new additions.

• This directory contains examples that show how to use bibtex to generate a reference section (I don't think you will need to do this for your lab 4 report, but FYI):

  /home/newhall/public/latex_examples/bitex/
  

  Note the differences in the build commands in the Makefile for this version and the paper example.