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Ubuntu Installation
If you're new to Temple Robotics, you may or may not have heard of the NASA Robotic Mining Competition. While we do other small side-projects throughout the semester, our participation in the Robot Mining Competition is our flagship project. As a member of the programming team, you will be assisting in developing the software to drive our mining robot. We already have a large repository of existing code that we will be building upon as we further develop the robot's software.
In order to contribute and test code, you will need to install and learn a few different software tools. In addition to being crucial to development for TURMC, many of these tools are widely used throughout industry and research.
Much of the software that we use is best supported on a Linux operating system, so we recommend that you install the latest version of the Ubuntu Desktop operating system. There are a few ways of installing Ubuntu, mainly: in a virtual machine through another operating system, on a separate partition on your existing hard drive or solid state drive, or on another drive altogether.
Installing Ubuntu on a virtual machine will allow you to use Ubuntu in your current operating system without partitioning your hard/solid state drive or using a separate drive. This is done by simulating virtual hardware via a program running on your desktop, such as Orcale VirtualBox.
A tutorial for installing Ubuntu this way can be found here: https://linus.nci.nih.gov/bdge/installUbuntu.html We aren't doing RNA analysis, so you won't need 100 GB! Anywhere between 8-12 GB should be good.
If you install Ubuntu on an existing hard/solid state drive, but in a separate partition, your computer will allow you to run both your current operating system, and the Ubuntu Desktop operating system. Each operating system will take up a certain amount of space on your drive, and your computer will allow you to choose which operating system to run when you start it.
To perform the installation, use the following tutorial from the official Ubuntu website: https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-install-ubuntu-desktop. Make sure that when you are given the option of allocating drive space that you do not choose to erase your disk - instead choose "Something else". This will allow you to create a separate partition on your drive to install Ubuntu without overwriting your existing operating system.
If you install Ubuntu on a new drive, or want to erase everything on an existing drive, follow the same tutorial as above, but instead do select "Erase disk" when allocating drive space.
Ubuntu has a graphical user interface, similar to other operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS X, complete with application windows, widgets, and other features. However, one powerful feature of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions is that they are built around command line interfaces, and that the GUI is just a wrapper around the interface. This means that you'll be able to easily access many operating systems commands simply through the usage of a terminal window.
To launch a terminal window, simply press Ctrl+Alt+T. From this window you can type commands and run them using enter. There are thousands of commands available on any Linux distribution depending on the software you have installed; however, one useful command on Ubuntu is apt install. This allows you to install software packages from Ubuntu's official software repositories. When installing software, you may need root or administrator privileges. To run a command with root access, simply prefix it with sudo. For example, if you wanted to install GCC, the standard C/C++ compiler for Linux, you would run the command sudo apt install gcc.
Note: you should be careful with any command you run as root; certain commands run with sudo can access sensitive system files that could mess up your computer if you're not careful!