User documentation

The newest version of Cubbli is 24. At the moment this will be installed on new computers only OR if the computer is reinstalled from scratch. So upgrading from 20 or 22 to 24 is not yet supported.

The current stable and still supported version of Cubbli Linux (Cubbli 22) is based mostly on Ubuntu 22.04. Cubbli 20 and  Cubbli 18, which are based on older Ubuntu versions are still getting security updates until April 2023, but will no longer under active development. If you wish to have the newest available software you should upgrade your Cubbli version (see link below). 

Cubbli linux comes preconfigured to the University's environment, which means that accessing University's network services, like printers, file shares, virtual desktops, remote accessible Linux machines, High-performance computation (HPC) clusters and Virtual private networks (VPNs) should be easy.

If your computer is using any other older Linux distribution, including older Cubbli Linux distributions, you should contact cubbli-upgrade(at)helsinki.fi to get an upgrade. In most s ituations the update can be done remotely and shouldn't take more than 1-2 hours. You can also do the upgrade yourself.

Instructions for upgrading Cubbli yourself is found here

For seeing the version of a specific software installed in the computer, you can, for example (from the command line):

Different Cubbli Linux flavors

• Classroom installations use shared network home directories. They are mostly located in publicly accessible spaces where there are multiple potential users, like classrooms and lecture halls.
• Remotely accessible VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) hosts share network home directories and default to Mate desktop environment, since 3D hardware accelerated graphics is not available in our current VDI environment.
• Workstation installations have local home directories, but network file shares are available by default. These are mostly staff's personal computers and can have multiple hard drives (a fast SSD drive and a slower but larger spinning hard drive) and sometimes GPUs for scientific computation. 
• Personal laptop installations don't have network home directories available (mounted) by default. These include staff's laptops, but also freshmen (fuksi) laptops. 
• Remotely accessible with ssh (or mosh) interactive multi user Cubbli hosts, which use shared network home directories. Currently these are melkinpaasi.cs.helsinki.fi,  melkinkari.cs.helsinki.fi, melkki.cs.helsinki.fi and pangolin.it.helsinki.fi. These hosts can also be used as a gateway host to other Linux hosts which provide ssh access, but are not visible outside University's firewall. They also listen for ssh connections in https port 443 to circumvent 3rd party firewalls. 

Home Directories

In a perfect world users would have only one home directory. However, we aren't living in a perfect world:

• Laptop and workstation Cubbli Linuxes use local home directories with a home directory path /home/local/user or sometimes just /home/user. By default no backups are made of local home directories, since we don't have enough shared disk space (or network capacity) to maintain them. 
• Classroom, interactive and VDI Cubbli Linuxes use shared NFS lxhome directory with path /home/ad/lxhome/u/user/Linux. This home directory has a default quota of 50 gigabytes, but it is regularly backed up and you can access snapshots of older versions of files from a hidden .snapshot sub directory.
• Computer Science department CS home directory /home/fs/user is available to Computer Science department's staff and students. It has a much larger quota than the default lxhome directory.  You can use the command line tool cubbli-home-dir to change your default Cubbli home directory to CS home directory instead of lxhome. 
• Z-drive is the default IT department home directory for Windows hosts and is available for Linux users too. It is available from path /home/ad/home/u/user. If you are using classroom, VDI or interactive Linux, then Desktop, Download and Documents subdirectories in lxhome are symlinks pointing to your Z-drive to enable easy document and space sharing with Windows installations. 
• Physics department's home, group and scratch directories are available from path /home/phys-data/
• If you had a home directory in the old and now defunct Unix servers (Kruuna, Klaava, Myntti, Cedi), the home directory is now available from path: /home/ad/lxhome/u/user/HY-Unix

Group Directories

• University's P-drive group directories are available from path /home/ad/dfs/group in workstations and classroom installations. Laptop users can use command mount /home/ad/dfs/group  to mount it when they are inside University's network. Outside University's network you can use Pangolin and sftp with path sftp://pangolin.it.helsinki.fi/home/ad/dfs/group .
• Computer Science Department's group directories are available from path /home/group/  in workstations and classroom installations. In laptop installations you can mount the group directory with the command mount /cs/group but remember to unmount it before suspending the laptop or moving outside University's network (NFS is likely to crash the Linux hosts if NFS server gets lost).

Desktop

The desktop environments available by default include:

• Cinnamon
• Mate
• Unity
• Gnome
• KDE
• XFCE

And also some windows managers which aren't available directly from the login screen. 

Dropbox, Google Chrome, Skype (MS beta package), Spotify local client and Open Broadcast Streaming (https://obsproject.com/) are available by default. 

Programming

We try to have all open source and freely available Linux programming languages and programming environments installed by default (this is why default Cubbli installation needs about 50G of disk space). The programming languages include GNU C, C++, Perl, Python,  OpenJDK, Oracle JDK, Haskell. Unlike in University's Windows environments, you are free to compile, install and run your own software (from your home directory). Nodejs, heroku and npm are installed. 

If we have missed some useful programming languages, environments or utilities, please contact helpdesk@helsinki.fi so that we know that it should be installed. 

NVidia CUDA drivers and programming environment with the NVIDIA CUDA® Deep Neural Network library is installed by default in Cubbli Linux hosts which have the required NVidia GPU (including VDI GPU hosts).

Scientific Software

Cubbli includes lots of software intended for scientific usage, including some commercially licensed software using University's licenses (this list is not complete). 

• R project for statistic computing version: https://www.r-project.org/
• RStudio Desktop open source version.
• GNU Octave Scientific Programming Language https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
• Julia, high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for numerical computing
• Matlab
• IDL Interactive Data Language
• SPSS
• Qgis Open Source Geographic Information System
• NoMachine Enterprise client

Some software packages are too large to be installed in the default installation, but are however packaged and configured to work with Cubbli Linux. These include:

• FreeSurfer open source software suite for processing and analyzing (human) brain MRI images. https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/
• Mathematica
• SPSS
• VMD Visual Molecular Dynamics: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/
   

Common problems and suggestions for admins

https://version.helsinki.fi/it4scifi/cubbli-help/-/issues here you can find known problems, possibly solutions and let us know how we can improve Cubbli (requesting software for example) by creating and commenting on issues.

Cubbli Linux is maintained by IT Center's IT for Science group.