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1. Go to the SLAC FastX web login page:  https://fastx.slac.stanford.edu:3443 
2. Log in with your SLAC Unix username and password.

3.  Do not check the Public Key Authentication option – that will not work well since it will not give you an AFS token.

4. To start a new session, click on the plus box: 

   
   
   

5. Inside the command box, you can start an xterm window and connect to a SLAC interactive login pool machine like this. You can replace rhel6-64 with the hostname of your own group's interactive login machine if you have one. Next to the command box, make sure 'multiple' is chosen (it's a drop down menu; the other choice is single).  Multiple means "multiple window mode" which allows you to move and resize your X client windows inside your browser window.

   xterm -e ssh rhel6-64.slac.stanford.edu

   
   
   

6. If you do not choose "multiple window mode", you may wish to start a lightweight window manager so you can resize and move windows around inside your browser window. Starting a lightweight window manager is not required, but it's necessary in single window mode if you want to move and resize your X Clients inside your browser window. To do that, type these two commands inside your xterm window  (the xsetroot command just makes your desktop background a more pleasing color):

   twm &
   xsetroot -solid grey

   Other lightweight window managers include fvwm2, fluxbox, and xfce.   If these are not installed, you can ask unix-admin to install them (they are part of the EPEL repository).  It is possible to run an entire gnome-session or startkde (for GNOME or KDE), but a better way to use FastX is to only start the specific applications you need, without using an entire desktop environment.
    

7. Now you can start your Linux X applications by typing the commands inside your xterm window.   For example:

   gimp &
   gvim &
   gnome-terminal &
   /afs/slac/package/anaconda/anaconda3/bin/spyder &
   
   

8. As always, your SLAC Unix AFS token needs to be renewed every 25 hours.   If your AFS token expires, then you will not be able to write files into your AFS home directory.  When you reconnect to your session later, the 'qtoken' command will quickly tell you if you have a current AFS token or not.  If your AFS token as expired, then use the 'kinit' command to get a new Kerberos ticket and AFS token.

   /usr/local/bin/qtoken
   /usr/local/bin/kinit

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