How to access Python for doing scientific computing

 

 

 

Much of the material in this document is taken from Appendix H.1 in the book A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python, 4th edition, by the same author, published by Springer, 2014.

Vagrant virtual machine

A vagrant machine is different from a standard virtual machine in that it is run in a terminal window on a Mac or Windows computer. You will write programs in Mac/Windows, but run them inside a Vagrant Ubuntu machine that can work with your files and folders on Mac/Windows. This is a bit simpler technology than a full VMWare Fusion virtual machine, as described above, and allows you to work in your original operating system. There is need to install VirtualBox and Vagrant, and on Windows also Cygwin. Then you can download a Vagrant machine with Ubuntu and either fill it with software as explained above, or you can download a ready-made machine. A special machine has been made for this document. We have a newer and richer machine running Ubuntu 14.04. This machine has most of the software you need for bachelor and master studies in natural science at the University of Oslo. The username and password are fenics.

Pre-i3/5/7 Intel processors and 32 vs. 64 bit. If your computer has a pre-i3/5/7 Intel processor and the processor does not have VT-x enabled, you cannot use the pre-packaged 64-bit virtual machines referred to above. Instead, you have to download a plain 32-bit Ubuntu image and install the necessary software (see the section Installing software on a minimalistic Ubuntu machine). To check if your computer has VT-x (hardware virtualization) enabled, you can use this tool: https://www.grc.com/securable.htm.