This page will help you get started setting up an environment on your personal computer to let you do most of the labs and MPs without remote connecting to the EWS machines. We highly recommend you attempt programming locally (on your own machine) as the EWS servers have a history of going down, being slow, and/or being overloaded in general. This will also enable you to work on assignments offline.

Please come to office hours or post on Piazza if these instructions do not make sense, or do not work.

Virtual Machine

We recently released a course Virtual Machine which comes preinstalled with all of the necessary utilities for developing MP’s and labs. This is the recommended option for Windows users. This is portable to any machines supported by VirtualBox.

Remote Connect

You have two options for remotely working on the EWS Linux cluster:

• Running a full desktop session using FastX: https://it.engineering.illinois.edu/user-guides/remote-access/connecting-ews-linux-fastx
• Connecting to a console session over SSH: https://it.engineering.illinois.edu/user-guides/remote-access/accessing-linux-terminals-remotely-ssh
  • For Mac OS X or any other Unix-like variant, you will need to open a terminal session.
    1. On OS X: Applications->Utilities->Terminal
    2. Then run the command: ssh NETID@linux.ews.illinois.edu (replacing NETID with your NetID)
    3. If this is your first connection, it will then prompt you to accept the public key from the host; type yes at this prompt and hit enter.
    4. At this point you should be prompted for your AD password; note that you will not see any characters displayed as you type.
    5. If your password was successfully accepted you should have a fully functioning EWS shell.
  • For Windows you will need to download http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe.
    1. Once you download PuTTY you will be prompted to enter the address to the server. Use NETID@linux.ews.illinois.edu, substituting in your NetID.
    2. You can save this by clicking the save button to the right of the highlighted default session. Optionally you could name this connection EWS.
    3. Now click connect and click “Yes” if it prompts you to accept the public key of the host machine.
    4. You will be asked to enter your AD password; note you will not see any characters as they are typed.
    5. If your password was successfully accepted you should have a fully functioning EWS shell.

We recommend connecting to a console session since an excessive amount of FastX sessions tends to become unstable on the EWS cluster or ends up refusing connections.

Working Natively

Linux

You should make sure you have the following packages installed:

• Clang and libc++ and the libc++abi: The Clang compiler and the libc++ C++ standard library implementation. This provides all of the compiler Utilities. On most distros you will need to make sure you have clang, libc++ and libc++abi (or similar) packages installed.
• libpng: The official PNG reference library. This is used to generate image output in your MP’s and labs. On systems which split this package please also install libpng-dev for the header files (png.h).
• Valgrind: A tool for finding memory leaks and general programming errors.
• Graphviz: Graph plotting tools used for assignments which display graphs and trees as images.
• GNUPlot: Plotting tools used for assignments which display graphs and charts as images.
• GDB: The GNU Debugger. We do not officially offer a tutorial for this tool as Valgrind usually suffices, but GDB allows you to step through your code and test specific execution paths.
• Subversion: The revision control system used for turning in assignments. On systems which have a separate package (something like libsvn-dev or subversion-dev) for the header files, you’ll need those too.

After installing the required packages, you should now be able to check out, build, and run assignments as described in their documentation.

Ubuntu 12.04

Unfortunately, there aren’t any widely-available packages for clang and libc++. Here is a guide on building them from source. It will probably take a long while to do so, so it may be beneficial to upgrade to a newer version of Ubuntu. This should get you the other requirements:

sudo apt-get install libpng-dev libsvn-dev gdb valgrind graphviz imagemagick subversion gnuplot

Other Ubuntu (>= 14.04)

This should get you all of the packages you’ll need:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install clang-3.5 libc++abi-dev libc++-dev libpng-dev libsvn-dev gdb valgrind graphviz imagemagick subversion gnuplot
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/clang clang /usr/bin/clang-3.5 100
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/clang++ clang++ /usr/bin/clang++-3.5 100

If you have a different version of clang installed, you might need to remove it first. Alternatively, if you don’t mind using a different version of clang, you can use the other version instead—just make sure to test your code on EWS. (You should do that anyway.)

Arch

This should get you all of the packages you’ll need:

sudo pacman -Sy clang35 libc++ libc++abi gdb valgrind graphviz imagemagick subversion gnuplot

The default clang package should work as well (it’s currently at 3.7), but make sure to test your code on EWS. (You should do that anyway.)

Mac OS X

If you do not wish to work natively, please follow the guide for installing the Virtual Machine. However, if you cannot use the Virtual Machine, and experience difficulties installing the software listed below, then please come speak with a TA during office hours, a lab section, or by posting on Piazza.

Compiler, Subversion

Run

xcode-select --install

to install the Xcode commandline tools. You should run that command even if you already have the commandline tools installed—running it sets up Apple’s version of clang to look for headers in the “regular” *nix places.

Other requirements

The easiest way to get the required software is by using a package manager. Homebrew and MacPorts are some of the more popular package managers. If you don’t already have one installed, we recommend installing Homebrew.

With Homebrew, run

brew install libpng

With MacPorts, run

sudo port install libpng

Windows

While it is certainly possible to develop under the Cygwin environment (you can Google this if you’re feeling really motivated), using the course Virtual Machine is probably easier.