How to use your own laptop for Physics 307

If you are able, I recommend that you use your own laptop (which you’re more comfortable with) for this class. (Then you won’t have to go to LSB to do your work!)

You can do this in several different ways:

If you have a Linux laptop

You’ll need to install the gnuplot package (run sudo apt install gnuplot on Ubuntu and Debian), then grab a copy of plot from the course computer. You can copy it into your system directory by running sudo scp username@phy-compphysclass.syr.edu:/usr/local/bin/plot /usr/local/bin/ and entering your admin password on your computer. (A little later you’ll need to get our animation utility as well.)

You can also download plot here; once you download it, copy it into your /usr/local/bin directory with sudo cp plot /usr/local/bin/.

Since you will be working locally, you won’t be connecting to the course computer for anything. This means that you won’t have to do anything difficult to submit your work (since it’ll be saved on your own computer).

If you have a Mac

You’ll need to install the gnuplot package first. To do this:

Go to http://brew.sh and install brew first in your laptop. Brew is a package manager for macOS that allows you to easily install software from the terminal.

First, you’ll want to install xquartz, which will give you nice graphical output from gnuplot. To do this, type brew cask install xquartz.

Then in the terminal just type brew install gnuplot. And you are done. In fact you can use brew in the future for any package installation. Just type in the terminal brew install <packagename>.

Then, grab a copy of plot from the course computer. You can copy it into your system directory by running sudo scp username@phy-compphysclass.syr.edu:/usr/bin/plot /usr/local/bin/ and entering first your admin password on your computer, then your login password on the course computer. (A little later you’ll need to get our animation utility as well.)

If plot doesn’t work out of the box, you’ll want to install a perl interpreter, which presumably can be done with brew install perl.

You can also download plot here; once you download it, copy it into your /usr/local/bin directory with sudo cp plot /usr/local/bin/.

If you have a Windows machine

Most scientific software doesn’t run on Windows, and I don’t know of any scientists who use Windows for serious computational or data-analysis work. However, you can still use a laptop with Windows for this class. There are several options:

Use your Windows laptop to connect to phy-compphysclass.syr.edu by downloading PuTTY and Xming, and do the same things that you do to connect from the computers in the lab. You will be doing your work on the course computer, and only using your laptop for remote access. This means that you will need a fast, stable internet connection in order to do any work.
Install Linux alongside Windows on your laptop. This is not as hard or scary as you might think. A ``dual-boot’’ machine like this will ask you “Linux or Windows?” every time you turn it on, and will boot the operating system you choose. You can easily access your Windows files from Linux, but not the other way around (without some shenanigans).
Use a USB key that we will give you with a Linux system on it. Whenever you want to boot your machine into Linux, you just insert the USB key, then reboot your machine and tell it to boot off of the USB key rather than your hard drive. Nothing on your hard drive will be changed, and you can save all your work onto the USB key.
Use a “virtual machine”. Computers these days are powerful enough to simulate additional computers inside of them. So your machine can run Windows, but simulate a second computer running Linux “inside” of it. We can give you a USB key that has everything you need to set this up. This is a nice, self-contained solution, since you just click the “run virtual machine” icon on your Windows desktop and a new window will appear, with an entire Linux system running inside of it.
(Extra credit opportunity!) Microsoft has added limited support for the Linux command-line and programming environment on Windows 10. I don’t have a Windows 10 machine; the old Windows desktop I keep around to play games on runs Windows 8, so I don’t know much about this. But one student has gotten the stuff for this class running on his Windows box. So you can do the whole class using this environment. I won’t be able to give you that much support on this, but if you can get it to work (including our animation software) and teach me and other students how you did it, then you’ll get extra credit: we’ll drop your lowest project grade and replace it with a 10/10.