On our workstations in Physics, the Unix/Linux shell that we use is called bash, and all of these settings are automatically taken care of by a start-up script (from /etc/profile.d/triumf.sh). To check, issue the following command in your terminal window:

   set | grep 'TRIUMF\|PHYSICA'

The command set will report the list of the so-called environment variables that are currently set, and grep will select only those that contain the words "TRIUMF" or "PHYSICA". If you do not see the right definitions (see below), here's what you may need to type at the shell prompt, before starting up physica:

   export TRIUMF_FONTS=/usr/local/lib
   export PHYSICA_DIR=/usr/local/lib/physica
   export TRIUMF_TERMINAL_TYPE=X
   export TRIUMF_PLOTTER_TYPE=PSA

If you would like to have physica start up with settings different from the default ones, you can create your own initialization file, init_filename, containing whatever set ... commands you wish. In order to tell physica to read this file when it starts, you need to tell it where to look, like this:

   export PHYSICA_INIT=init_filename

The default init_filename is .physicarc in your home directory.