CS 251 Software Setup

Keep in mind that the 3rd-Olin computer labs are set up with what you’ll need for this class. If you want to work on your own laptop, follow these instructions.

If you have any issues with the following instructions, check in with Mike Tie in Olin 337. He and his student workers have tons of experience installing software for CS courses, and may be able to help you better than I can.

  1. Install VS Code: If you don’t have VS Code on your laptop yet, download and install it.

  2. Install Docker Desktop + set up the Docker Container: We will use a Docker Container to set up our programming environment. Follow these instructions to install Docker Desktop and set up the class Docker Container. This should give you a folder (a.k.a. directory) named ProgrammingLanguages that you’ll use for development in this course.

    • Note: When following these instructions, I recommend that you use my version of the git repo instead, as it fixes an issue in Windows:
    git clone https://github.com/tanya-amert/ProgrammingLanguages.git

    • Note: You will have to select “Trust Folder & Continue” a few times throughout the VS Code dev container setup process.

    • Note: I had issues on Windows with a permission error when trying to connect to the Dev Container in VS Code. I had to delete the line with credsStore in my ~/.docker/config.json file to make it work.

  3. Install Emacs (optional but recommended): Later in the term we will use VS Code for writing code in C, but at first we’ll be writing code in Scheme. Unfortunately, VS Code isn’t great about indenting Scheme code correctly, so I recommend you use Emacs. How you install Emacs depends on your OS:

    • Mac: Download Emacs from the Emacs for Mac OS X site. This gives you a .dmg file that you can just open and use to install Emacs.

    • Windows: Download and run the Emacs installer for Windows.

    • Linux: Run the following pair of instructions if you’re on Ubuntu or another Debian-related distribution of Linux. For an alernative distribution, you’ll need to figure out how to adapt accordingly.

    sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install emacs

  4. Install extension for Scheme syntax highlighting in VS Code (recommended): If you want to view Scheme files in VS Code, like you may later in the term or if you don’t plan to use Emacs early on, install this VS Code Scheme extension.