Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Spring Semester, 2007
6.081: Introduction to EECS 1

Installing the software on GNU/Linux

The laptops in the lab use Ubuntu, so we know things work on that. We also expect the software to work on other distributions. Details of the installation depend on which GNU/Linux distribution you are running, so talk to the staff for help.

A. Get Python and Numeric

We will be using Python 2.4 this semester, which is the version currently distributed with most major GNU/Linux distributions. You can either use your distribution's package manager (apt, yum, etc.) to download and install Python, or you can compile from source.

You will also need to install Numeric, a Python package, for some of the assignments. Again, installation will be dependent on your distribution. For Debian-based distros, there is a package (python-numeric) that you can install with apt. For other distributions, you can either compile from source or find the appropriate package for your distribution. This semester, we will be using Numeric 24.2.

Important: Do not use NumPy, the sucessor to Numeric. It will not work correctly with SoaR.

B. Get SoaR

Download and extract the latest version of SoaR to a temporary folder (your desktop, home directory, /tmp, etc.). In a terminal window, navigate to the directory you extracted SoaR to, and at the prompt, do: 
cd SoaR
sudo python setup.py install
Note that since the installation script writes to protected system directories, if you do not have sudo set up, you will need to become root before running the script.

C. Run SoaR

To start SoaR, do: 
python -c "import SoaR;SoaR.run()"
For convenience, you may wish to create an alias to the last command so SoaR can be easily started from the command line. If you are using bash as your shell, this can be accomplished by adding the following to your ~/.bash_profile file: 
alias SoaR='python -c "import SoaR;SoaR.run()"'