Course 00: Software Installation

Sunday August 28 2016

Objectives

Each student should end up with a bundle of softwares which are needed in the compulsory courses of the Cogmaster.

Important informations

The only slot in the schedule dedicated to installation of softwares is on Tuesday August 30 from 9:00 to 12:00. We will not answer installation questions during the following Info 1 or Info 2 lectures. We will be reluctant to to help you if you were not attending on Tuesday morning.

This evening, you have at least 2 important things to do:

  1. backup your computer before the installations
  2. free at least 5 GB on your hard drive

Some installations will require an internet access, login and password for the ENS wifi will be provided on Monday, don’t forget to bring them on Tuesday morning.

Installation procedures have been succesfully tested on computers running Windows (7 64bits), MacOS (10.9 Maverick), and debian-based linux (Debian 8 Jessie 64bits). We have have few years of experience with usual install problems on various Operating System versions (Mac OS 10.6 to 10.11, Windows XP, 8 and 10, various linux flavors), but there are always some computers on which the usual procedures and fixes fail. We will try our best, if it happens to you, please be patient.

Non-standard equipement (typically tablets or some mini-PC) or OS (Chrome, iOS,…) are not supported.

If you are using Windows 10, make sure your user name doesn’t include characters that don’t belong to the english alphabet (accents, ideograms,…).

The download and installation instructions are specified below. Before Tuesday morning, unless you have an unsupported equipement or OS or don’t have access to internet, or don’t own a laptop, please download the software installers. The ENS wifi is usually very slow and prone to disconnections.

If you are using a debian-based Linux distribution, most of the install will be made using the apt package manager, thus is way safer to try the installation at your home than at the ENS if you have a decent internet connection.

You migh skip the Atom download and install if you are already using an advanced text editor such as wim, emacs, sublimetext…
Beware: Microsoft Office Word, LibreOffice and other document formatting softwares are not text editors.

Download instructions

When you download an installer file for a software, it is very important to:

  1. make sure you know in which folder the instaler file is saved
  2. just download the file, not execute it, so please de-activate any internet browser preference that would automatically execute a file upon download completion, and for Windows users, make sure you always select the save the file as option when the usual dialog window pops up for a download.

Select the download instructions for your operating system:
Downloads for Windows
Downloads for Mac OS
Downloads for Debian based Linux

Installation instructions

First, read the installation instructions relative to your operating system. Yes, I mean it, read all the installation instructions before trying to install anything.

Now, if what you’ve just read makes sense, you can try to install the softwares by following carefully the instructions step by step, not skipping any.

If you feel unsure, don’t worry, just wait until Tuesday morning for the installation.

Some installations, especially components for pygame on Mac OS, are rather tricky, If you are not 100% sure of what some instruction for one step means, stop right before this step. It is much easier to prevent a misinstallation than to fix it. Don’t install anything after this step as there are some dependencies.

Same if something does not work as expected, stop there and ask for our help on Tuesday morning.

Select the installation instructions for your operating system:
Installations for Windows
Installations for Mac OS
Installations for Debian based Linux

Once the installation on your computer completed, you can get some reading material from the teachers (you will be able to get if on the following courses if you succesfully installed everything at home and thus don’t need to come tomorrow morning)

Downloads for Windows

First, you need to know whether you are using a 64 bits or a 32 bits version of Windows, follow the instructions on this website

If you are using windows 7 or earlier, it will be useful to know the full name of your files, so open a file explorer (window key + e), then select the Organize menu, then Folder and search options, then the second tab View, uncheck the box Hide extensions for known file types, and finally click the OK button.

Scratch

Text Editor

R and RStudio

Git

Python documentation

Python

Downloads for Mac OS

Warming up

  1. Make sure you know the administrator password for your computer (the password of your main account, i.e. the one you use to install new software) and that you are able to type blind (i.e. even if you don’t see little stars for each character).

  2. Know you system version, so you can chose which file to download

| 10.4 | 10.5 | 10.6 | 10.7 | 10.8 | 10.9 | 10.10 | 10.11 | |——|——|——|——|——|——|——-|——-| | Tiger | Leopard | Snow Leopard | Lion | Mountain Lion | Mavericks | Yosemite | El Capitan | | 2005 | 2007 | 2009 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | * Check that your version of Mac OS X is 10.9 or higher (for example 10.9.5 or 10.11.2 are higher, but 10.6.10 is lower).
If not or if you can’t or don’t want to risk an upgrade this evening, or if you are not sure, stop right now, don’t download or install anything, and come see us tomorrow at 9:00 am: you might be in one of the most complicated situations regarding software installations.

XQuartz

Python documentation

Python

Git

Atom

Scratch

R and RStudio

Command Line Tools

Downloads for Debian based Linux

First of all, you must determine if your system is 32 or 64 bits. Open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) and type the command

arch

If you see x86_64, your operating system is 64 bits, if you see i386 or i686, it is 32 bits.

Text Editor

Note: If you are already using a decent text editor under linux (gedit, emacs, vim,…) you won’t need Atom.

Python documentation

Python2.7

Rstudio

Installations for Windows

Scratch

  1. Open a file explorer (windows key + e) and open the directory in which you downloaded the installer file ScratchInstaller1.4.exe, typically the default Downloads directory.
  2. then execute the installer:
  1. test Scratch

R and RStudio

  1. Installation
  1. Verification

Git

  1. Set up an account on Github.com
  1. Installations

Text Editor

Python documentation

Python

  1. Installation of the Anaconda distribution
  1. Test
  1. Installing pygame
  1. Testing pygame
  2. First test
  3. Second test
  4. Installing expyriment
  5. Launch the anaconda terminal
  6. execute the following command (type the text, then press on the Enter key): pip install expyriment
  7. Testing expyriment
  8. Launch the ipython console as you did in the 4th step (Window icon, All the programs and then the Anaconda2 64 bits folder, then on Ipython).
    You should see the In [1]: and the blinking cursor after which you can start typing.
  9. In the console, type or copy paste the following lines one by one import expyriment exp = expyriment.design.Experiment(name="test") expyriment.control.initialize(exp)
  10. You should now see this message: Python is running in an interactive shell but Expyriment wants to initialize a fullscreen Do you want to switch to windows mode? (Y/n)
  11. Confirm the switch to a windowed mode by hitting the Enter key (Y is in uppercase to show it’s the default option, you can also type “yes” then hit Enter).
  12. Then you should see the expyriment window appear and do its stuff (“preparing expyriment…”) until the “Preparing experiment…” message is displayed
  13. Select the python window and execute the following command: expyriment.control.start()
  14. Then you should select the expyriment window and hit Enter to validate the subject number.
    The windows should now diplay “Ready”. Hit Enter a second time to validate.
  15. Select the python window, you should see the In [X]: and the blinking cursor after which you can start typing, then execute the following command: expyriment.control.end() If this doesn’t close the expyriment window, hit the Enter key once more.
    Now you can exit the python command line using Ctrl+d and Enter.

Installations for Mac OS

Configuration

XQuartz

Git

  1. Set up an account on Github.com
  1. Installation
  1. configuration: you should see a window that says “Let’s take a minute to setup your computer”

Atom

Scratch

  1. Install MacScratch1.4.dmg as usual:
  1. test Scratch

R and RStudio

  1. R installation
  1. RStudio installation
  1. Verification

then, hit the Enter key.

Python documentation

Python

  1. Install the Anaconda python distribution
  1. Test python

  1. Warning Now the Mac python install procedure starts to be tricky, if you don’t feel confident with typing commands in a terminal, of if you’d like to sleep, stop rigth now, we will carry on Tuesday morning.
    Otherwise, stay up for some more fun with the terminal!

  2. Install “Homebrew
  1. Install pygame dependencies
  1. Install “conda”
  1. Finally install pygame
  1. Check the pygame installation
  1. Installing expyriment
  2. install expyriment from the terminal
  3. restart your session
  4. Testing expyriment
  5. log in your session
  6. open a Terminal
  7. Launch the ipython console by executing the command ipython

  8. In this ipython console, once you see the In [1]: and the blinking cursor, type or copy paste the following lines one by one import expyriment

    exp = expyriment.design.Experiment(name="test")

    expyriment.control.initialize(exp)

    Then you should see this message:
    > Python is running in an interactive shell but Expyriment wants to initialize a fullscreen > Do you want to switch to windows mode? (Y/n)

  9. Confirm the switch to a windowed mode by hitting the Enter key (Y is in uppercase to show it’s the default option, you can also type “yes” then hit Enter).

  10. Then you should see the expyriment window appear and do its stuff (“preparing expyriment…”) until the “Preparing experiment…” message is displayed

  11. Select the python window and execute the following command: expyriment.control.start()

  12. Then you should select the expyriment window and hit Enter to validate the subject number.
    The windows should now diplay “Ready”. Hit Enter a second time to validate.

  13. Select the python window, you should see the In [X]: and the blinking cursor after which you can start typing, then execute the following command to finish the experiment and close the window: expyriment.control.end()

    If this doesn’t work, turn your computer on and of again, then retest expyriment.

Installations for Debian based Linux

Text Editor

The *.deb files can be installed by simply clicking on them, or on the command line, with the command sudo dpkg -i, e.g.:

sudo dpkg -i atom-amd64.deb

Python documentation

In a terminal, go where you donloaded the python-2.7.12-docs-html.zip archive and type the following command, using the path to where you want to store the documentation files

unzip -d path_to_a_directory python-2.7.12-docs-html.zip

Python

  1. Install python 2.7
  1. Check the python installation
  1. Install Pygame
  1. Check the pygame installation
  1. Installing expyriment
  2. install expyriment from the terminal
  3. restart your session
  4. Testing expyriment
  5. log in your session
  6. open a Terminal

  7. Launch the ipython console by executing the command ipython

  8. In this ipython console, once you see the In [1]: and the blinking cursor, type or copy paste the following lines one by one import expyriment

If you see the following error message

ImportError: libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Then type the following command in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install libsdl-mixer1.2

And start again.

 ```
 exp = expyriment.design.Experiment(name="test")
 ```

 ```
 expyriment.control.initialize(exp)
 ```

 Then you should see this message:  
 > Python is running in an interactive shell but Expyriment wants to initialize a fullscreen
 > Do you want to switch to windows mode? (Y/n)

  1. Confirm the switch to a windowed mode by hitting the Enter key (Y is in uppercase to show it’s the default option, you can also type“ye then hit Enter).

  2. Then you should see the expyriment window appear and do its stuff (“preparing expyriment…”) until the “Preparing experiment…” message is displayed

  3. Select the python window and execute the following command: expyriment.control.start()

  4. Then you should select the expyriment window and hit Enter to validate the subject number.
    The windows should now diplay “Ready”. Hit Enter a second time to validate.

  5. Select the python window, you should see the In [X]: and the blinking cursor after which you can start typing, then execute thefollowi command to finish the experiment and close the window: expyriment.control.end()

You can now exit the ipython console

Git

  1. Download et installation sudo apt-get install git-core

  2. Configuration, by typing in a terminal with the appropriate replacements git config --global user.name "your_user_name" git config --global user.email your_email@example.com

Scratch

  1. Installation: in a terminal, type sudo apt-get install scratch

  2. Test : in the terminal of a graphic console, type scratch

You should see a new window, where you should be able to grab and move the little mascot.

R

The instructions to install R are available here: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/README.html#installation

  1. Setup
  1. Install R

Rstudio

  1. Installation
  1. Verification