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Faculty of Mathematics | Computerlab
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Mathematics Computerlab

The computerlab is a central facility of the Faculty of Mathematics. It provides the whole faculty with computers and computing services, including the maintenance of the underlying server infrastructure. At present, we administer some 300 clients and 50 servers, and run important services like the faculty website.

 

News

July 2025 Sciebo Update

On July 24, the Sciebo instance at Bielefeld University was migrated from OwnCloud to NextCloud.

If you are using a Windows PC that is administrated by us, you can update Sciebo using the Portal Manager provided you are in the University network. Note that you should close all applications beforehand as the computer will restart twice.

If you are using a Linux PC that is administrated by us, you will have to follow these steps:

  1. First disable the owncloud client. To this end, click the cogwheel in the owncloud client and turn off the automatic start at login. Then close the owncloud client.
    Note that if owncloud is already removed from your system, this step is skipped.
  2. Make sure that the folder you want to synchronize is located below /var/data/$USER where $USER is your linux user name. Note that you cannot synchronize folders on a network share!
  3. Either launch "NextCloud Desktop" via the menu or by entering "nextcloud" in a terminal.
  4. Configure the nextcloud client as follows. The instance is "uni-bielefeld.sciebo.de". Your username is user@uni-bielefeld.de where "user" is your account in Prisma. If desired, activate the autostart of the client.

On all other devices, you have to migrate to the nextcloud client by following the official guide.
 

April 2025 Upgrade of the linux clients

We will update the linux clients in April to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ("Noble Numbat"). In this version, the procedure to select the desktop environment has changed:

  1. Enter your user name and press enter.
  2. A cogwheel appears on the lower right corner which can be used to select the desktop environment. We currently provide:
    • Gnome
    • Gnome classic
    • Ubuntu
    • XFCE
  3. After entering your password, the selected desktop will launch.

Note that the PC remembers the last choice for each individual user.

The lock screen of Gnome does no longer provide a method to switch users or to restart the machine. To do so, one has to switch to the login manager with Ctrl-Alt-F1. A newly started session will end up on Ctrl-Alt-F3 while the locked one is still available under Ctrl-Alt-F2.

 

07. 05. 2019 Upgrade of webmail

With the new release, an experimental mobile-skin is now available, which simplifies its use on mobile phones considerably. Some features may not yet work under this skin, such as setting filters, but these are still accessible under the normal skin.

 

15. 9. 2018 Upgrade of all linux clients

On 15 September 2018, all linux clients of the faculty have been upgraded to 18.04 LTS ("Bionic"). Please note the following changes.

Choice of the desktop

We continue to offer the desktops Xfce4 (default), Gnome Flashback, Gnome 3 and "user defined". Unfortunately, the computers no longer remember the preferences for each user, but only the last used desktop on that computer. For computers with a single user, this is no problem, but on computers with several users (computer pool, tutor's offices), you have to choose your desired desktop before each login. There is an icon (the left-most one of the icon group on the top right of the login screen) which indicates the current choice.

/var/tmp becomes /var/data

The dirctory /var/tmp on the local disk is now mounted under the new path /var/data. The data are preserved under this operation. /var/tmp will still exist (with much less space), and will initially be empty. If you have links to /var/tmp, or scripts which access /var/tmp, you have to adapt these.

/var/data can be used for large data (local data is accessed much faster than via the network), such as for postprocessing of simulation data, or for compiling large program packages, or for data which can easily recovered from the net (downloads, sync folders of cloud storage).

Firefox ESR no longer provided

With very many pages, Firefox ESR does not work well, and is no longer provided. Please use the standard firefox instead. If you used Firefox ESR before, and want to migrate stored bookmarks and passwords, you can proceed as follows:

  1. Start firefox from the command line with the option -ProfileManager
  2. In the profile manager, create a new profile and start firefox with it
  3. Stop firefox again
  4. Copy the contents of the old Firefox ESR profile folder in ~/.mozilla/firefox-esr/ to the newly created profile folder located in ~/.mozilla/firefox/
  5. After that, you can start firefox again normally.