How to access Python for doing scientific computing

This chapter is taken from the book A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python by H. P. Langtangen, 5th edition, Springer, 2016.

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. We have made a sample machine with the most commonly needed tools for doing scientific computing with Python. The username and password are both fenics. We also have a larger and richer machine. 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 VMWare Fusion virtual machine). To check if your computer has VT-x (hardware virtualization) enabled, you can use this tool: https://www.grc.com/securable.htm.