Skip to content

Computational Setup

For this computational setup, we’ll be using Ubuntu as our operating system. This requires dual booting on Windows 11 with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Setup for Windows

Installing Ubuntu

  1. Make partition for installing the OS

  2. Go to your disk management tool on windows.

  3. Select your biggest partition (by default the C drive)
  4. Click “Shrink Volume”
  5. Shrink 50gb → go to IT if the shrink fails
  6. Create a new partition

  7. Acquire a bootable USB that has the Ubuntu image

  8. Restart the computer and enter BIOS settings (Press F2)

  9. Select the USB with Ubuntu image as the primary boot loader

  10. Disable Secure Boot if enabled
  11. Save and exit

  12. When the computer starts again, select “Try/Install Ubuntu”

  13. Stick to the default settings EXCEPT the partition to install Ubuntu on

  14. Make sure that the selected partition matches the size of the partition you created earlier
  15. Continue until the installation finishes

Install VSCode

  • Download and install VSCode for respective OS

GitHub Setup

  • First make an account if you haven’t already!
  • Tell me (@dedeisnerd on discord) your GitHub username
  • I’ll add you to the Olin-Hydro organization on GitHub

GitHub SSH Setup

  1. Create an SSH key on your local machine

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"

  1. Add that key to your local ssh key agent

eval "$(ssh-agent -s)" ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

  1. Add that key to your GitHub account

cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

→ Running the line above will return a long string of alphabets and numbers, followed by a space and the email that you entered. Copy the content of this key file by dragging the string and pressing Ctrl+Shift+C (Ctrl+C will not work on Ubuntu terminal).

  • Now, go to your GitHub account settings. Click on the “SSH and GPG keys.”
  • Click “New SSH key or Add SSH key”
  • Paste the copied key
  • Give it a descriptive name, like “Olin Laptop Ubuntu”
  • Click “Add SSH key”

  • Confirm the authentication ssh -T git@github.com → Running this command should say something like “you have authenticated.”

More information from GitHub: https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-github-with-ssh/generating-a-new-ssh-key-and-adding-it-to-the-ssh-agent

Git Setup

Configuring Git for you

  • Run the command git config --global user.name "Alan Turing", substituting your name for Alan Turing (but leaving the quotes in place).
  • To set your email, run git config --global user.email "alan@turing.org", substituting your GitHub email address for alan@turing.org. It’s important that your email match the one that GitHub has, because a mismatch can make Git fail in unintuitive ways.
  • To set Git to use VS Code, run git config --global core.editor "code --wait". Again, leave the quotes in place.
  • If you mistyped anything in quotes (your name, email, or code --wait) you can run that command again with the correct name/email to fix the typo. If you mistyped user.nameuser.email, or core.editor in the commands, you can use git config --unset user.name (replacing user.name with whatever you mistyped earlier) to remove that setting, and try again.

The information above was taken from Configuring Git section of Olin’s SoftDes website:

Computational Setup Instructions

Install Anaconda

*Anaconda is a package manager and it will save you from having dependency errors when working with complex packages. Rule of thumb is to always try to use the same package installer. Installation link

If you’re using Ubuntu or MacOS, once you’ve downloaded the program, run:

# Change the directory to where the download is!
$ bash ~/Downloads/<Anaconda3-some-version-xx>.sh