Foundations of Quantum Information Science (QIS101)

Using VSCode, JupyterLab, and IBM Qiskit

QIS101 Slides

Setup

Install uv, then from the project folder run:

uv sync

This creates a .venv with everything needed. The courseware runs on Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), and Linux.

Git setup for contributors

If you will commit changes, run these two commands once from the project folder after cloning:

git config core.hooksPath githooks
git config filter.nbclean.clean "uv run --quiet --no-project python nb_clean.py"

The first registers the pre-commit hook, which runs nb_check.py and refuses a commit containing a notebook without %matplotlib inline or a script that reads or writes data files outside its own folder. The second registers the filter that strips the interpreter version and execution timestamps from notebooks as they are staged, so notebooks nobody edited do not show up as changed.

Git never runs hooks or filters that arrive with a clone until they are registered locally, so skipping this step causes no errors. The checks simply do not run. See nb_check vs nb_clean.md for how both tools work.

Linux notes

Standalone .py scripts open an interactive matplotlib window via Qt (PySide6). On Linux this requires:

• Ubuntu 22.04+ / Linux Mint 21+ (or another distro with glibc ≥ 2.34) so uv sync can install PySide6.

• The Qt xcb platform plugin's system library. If a script fails with "Could not load the Qt platform plugin 'xcb'", install it once with:

  sudo apt install libxcb-cursor0

The Jupyter notebooks render plots inline and need none of the above — they run on any platform with no extra system packages.