In order to minimise the time we spend during the workshop on installation issues, please try to install the following software on your laptop before the course starts.
However, if you have problems with these instructions, we will (try to) solve them during the workshop!
The simplest way to install Julia is with a binary install: download an installer for your operating system from here.
If you use Windows, you probably want to also install git for Windows,
which provides a proper Unix-like shell.
The install from source (which requires compiling Julia itself) takes around 1 hour. At the prompt, do
$ git clone git@github.com:JuliaLang/julia.git
$ cd julia
$ make -j 4
The 4 in the last line is the number of processors that will be used for the build.
It requires various other tools installed, in particular cmake and m4; see full details in the Julia README here.
Juno is a neat IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for Julia. It can also be downloaded from here; see also http://junolab.org.
IJulia is a Julia interface for the Jupyter (formerly IPython) notebook that we will use extensively.
First you must install IPython itself. [Currently, the parts of IPython which are not directly related to Python are being separated out into a package called Jupyter.] The simplest way to do so is to install the free Anaconda Python distribution, which includes IPython, the matplotlib plotting library, and many other useful Python packages.
If you prefer something more lightweight, you can use pip (an installer for Python packages):
pip install --upgrade ipython[all]
On Ubuntu, you will first need to do
sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo apt-get install python-pip
On Mac OSX you will need to add the two lines
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
to the .bash_profile file in your home directory (or create that file with that content if it does not already exist).
Once the IPython notebook has been installed, run Julia, and from within Julia add the IJulia package:
Pkg.add("IJulia")After several things have been installed, you should see a message saying that IJulia successfully found your IPython installation and has created the necessary files.