Instructions for Windows users#
The majority of the content for the crash course is aimed at Linux and macOS users. Most commands written in the next chapters won’t work natively on Windows systems.
On this page, you will find instructions to setup you Windows system so you can execute seamlessly all of the Linux/macOS commands and work with ssh, git or code with VSCode.
Git bash - basic option#
If what you need is a terminal that behaves just like a Linux terminal to connect to a remote server via ssh and possibly version some file with git, all you need is to install git for Windows.
It will provide a shell emulator called git bash which you can consider like a terminal, except its usage is limited to a few commands ssh, scp, find, git, and a few others.
This is a good option if you don’t want to use your computer to develop.
Conda distribution - beginner Python developers#
Installing the package and environment manager conda, either via the Anaconda distribution (beginners) or the Miniconda distribution (most users) is very convenient for Windows users that want to develop in Python and install most software on their machines, without having to setup everything on your own.
Installation procedure can be found here, as well as instructions for starting up the anaconda terminal (which looks like a Linux terminal, with Windows paths). This terminal will have the conda command with which you can create environments and install most Python packages as such
conda create -n my_env -c conda-forge
conda activate my_env
(my_env) conda install numpy scipy ipython
See lecture on environments for more detailed info.
Window Subsystem Linux (WSL) - advanced option#
Finally, for those used to work with Linux/macOS before and interested in configuring a bit more their own computer, the best solution is WSL.
For the past few years, Windows has increased the support for a Unix-like environment inside Windows. The idea is to install Linux on a virtual machine and get access to the same files as on Windows.
Installation#
Instructions for installing such system are quite simple for the recent versions of Windows and basically are two steps:
Open Windows
Powershellin administrator mode (right click “Execute as admin”)Type and execute the following command
wsl --install
For older versions of Windows (if the above does not work) then have a look at the manual instructions.
Setup#
Once the Linux distribution (probably Ubuntu) installed, you will find yourself like on Linux machine, with a terminal that accepts the commands and instructions written everywhere in this crash course.
To help you get started, here are a few tutorials to setup