General Information "Computing for Scientists" at the ILL

• D20 Instrument Control
• Where am I?
• D20's Instrument Control program MAD
• Problems?

D20 is equipped with a Linux Workstation (d20.ill.fr) for instrument control, live display of the data acquisition and sample environment status with two desktop screens. You may login from everywhere inside the ILL firewall but instrument control ("mad") should only be performed at the instrument itself. So you may use directly the workstation on ground level behind the protection wall of D20 or you connect to it from any terminal window on any other computer (Linux, MacOSX or Windows) inside ILL via ssh d20@d20.ill.fr. To log in you need to know the user name 'd20' and the password 'd20d20' given by your local contact or instrument responsible. If you log in from outside you have to log in to firewall.ill.fr first, after having obtained an account from the operators in ILL19 (HelpDesk, phone 7013).

D20's Instrument Control program MAD Now you should open a terminal window unless you are working from a simple ASCII-terminal(-emulation) and make it the active window by clicking on the title bar (or - depending on your preferences - by hovering the mouse pointer over the window). Type 'cd' to go to your home directory .... Finally in the right directory, type mad and you will be in the instrument control environment - if it is not already running elsewhere. Remember: Only one user at a time may control the instrument. Inside the MAD-environment (if you do not see the MAD> prompt, type simply <return>) you can type your control commands as pos, par, acq, scan, read, state, stop, quit, date etc. and scroll the command history by the cursor control keys.

Once in MAD (line mode on terminal window), you may - for instance - type read followed by <return> (for simplifying matters, <return> has to be typed after every command) in order to read the current motor parameters. Let's have a look on MAD's commands! 

After a crash ...

Mad only runs on the Linux station d20.ill.fr, and only in one instance. If the workstation d20.ill.fr breaks down, you may find yourself in front of a black  (then switch the machine on), then just switch it on. When the login screen comes up, log in as user 'd20' with password 'd20d20'. Now you may start Mad by typing 'mad' and 'RETURN' in a xterm (to open those, click on the terminal icon in the toolbar on the top of the left screen). From another xterm you may start a new xterm by typing 'xterm'. In that new xterm you may start an online visualisation by typing 'visu'.

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