Access Your Astro Account:
Some of our assignments will utilize Astro, the shared Linux environment available to all Temple students. You should be able to access Astro using your Temple user account and ID. Please watch the following video, and ensure you are able to access Astro. If you have trouble with Astro, you will need to contact the helpdesk prior to our first assignment using Astro in week 4.
Install Linux VM:
We will be using Linux for several of our assignments, which you can install in a Virtual Machine. Although you can use any hypervisor of your choice, I would recommend VMWare Workstation Player. It is free for non-commercial use, and can used to run our Linux systems from within Windows. If you are using an Apple product, there are alternatives available for those environments.
For this course, I recommend using Fedore 23, since I have written the assignments to work with this version. However, if you are a Linux expert, and prefer to use the distro of your choice and adapt them to your installed version, you are welcome to do so (but I may not be able to help all students with issues on versions other than 23). I will provide an FTP download link for the 64bit ISO for Fedora Workstation 23.
To download VMWare Workstation Player 12, at the time of this writing, the following URL works: https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/free#desktop_end_user_computing/vmware_workstation_player/12_0 (Note, that these URLs can change periodically, so you may need to search for the download link using Google).
To download Fedora release 23, use this URL: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/23/Workstation/x86_64/iso/
Once VMPlayer has been installed, you can follow my video instructions for installing Fedora in a VM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAddVF6N_sA&feature=youtu.be