Installation instructions for Geilo Winter School

This page contains the instructions on the tools you need to set up in advance for my lectures at the 2013 Geilo Winter School on Reproducible Science And Modern Scientific Software. Please contact me if you run into any problems and I’ll do my best to assist you.

Accounts and software install¶

Start by signing up for a (free) account on Github.

Mac or Windows users

• Download and install git. You can accept all the default options from the installer.
• Download and install the free edition of the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD).

You will also need to update the IPython notebook installation to the current version:

• On a Mac, using the Terminal application:

  sudo enpkg enstaller
  sudo enpkg ipython

• On Windows, at the Command Prompt (cmd.exe application):

  enpkg enstaller
  enpkg ipython

Linux users

You can also use EPD, but most up to date distributions have everything we need in their package managers. On Ubuntu or other Debian-based distributions, type at the shell:

sudo apt-get install ipython-notebook python-scipy python-matplotlib python-nose \
                     git gitk git-gui

On Fedora or other non-apt distributions, please refer to your package manager (the package names should be very similar).

Editing code¶

If you have a favorite programming editor already, skip this section.

Python is a programming language, so at some point you’ll need to type code. Learning how to use a good, powerful text editor is one of the best investments of time you can make in terms of computing-related skills. I’m a life emacs user, but vi is equally sophisticated (in a very different style). These editors, however, aren’t the easiest to get started with (if you’re serious about computing though, I strongly recommend you do learn how to use them).

If you want something with a slightly easier learning curve to begin with, the following are all free, good options:

• Linux: gedit (typically installed by default).
• OSX: Text Wrangler.
• Windows: Notepad ++.

Test that everything is ready¶

Once you’ve installed the code above, please download (save to your disk) this file and execute it as per the instructions contained in it (at the top). It runs a set of sanity checks on your system to ensure that things are reasonably well installed, and will provide diagnostics information along with instructions on what to do.