NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System User's Guide

Getting Started

Enter mosaic at the prompt to start up NCSA Mosaic on your machine. The first window, which is retrieved from the NCSA Web server, displays the NCSA Mosaic Home Page with the NCSA Mosaic logo at the top as shown in Figure 1.1. (A Home Page is a start-up document that serves as your home base for explorations on the Web.)

The NCSA Mosaic Home Page contains a welcome statement and some basic information about NCSA, the NCSA Software Development Group, and NCSA Mosaic software. From this page you can move anywhere by single clicking on the embedded hyperlinks, choosing menu options, or entering a Uniform Resource Locator (URL -- see ``The URL Format'') for a document of your choosing.

NCSA Mosaic Logo

If you receive an error message instead of the NCSA Mosaic Home Page, you may have an incomplete connection to the Internet. Other possibilities include NCSA's Web server being heavily utilized resulting in a ``busy signal,'' your local system administrator may have changed the default home page, or, if you are using a Sun workstation, you may have a version conflict with one of the libraries. Contact your local system administrator for more information and for assistance in modifying your system configuration.

.Xdefaults file

Some NCSA Mosaic options, such as the name of the file tracking all the documents you have accessed, can be changed if you establish an .Xdefaults file.

To see the various options, choose Manual from the Help menu, or see ``System Configuration and Modification Assistance'' for additional information.


National Center for Supercomputing Applications / mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu