Microsoft released a tool known as "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL) that allows you to open a linux terminal on windows and interact with it as if it was linux.

This is a very powerful tool that allows you to essentially use linux-solutions (e.g. "how to install python 3.7 on linux") natively on windows.

This guide by Microsoft shows you how to install WSL, and we would recommend choosing Ubuntu 20.04 as the version of linux you install with.

Once installed, we recommend doing all of your work in a folder such as /mnt/c/ , which is your linux terminal accessing your C:\ drive on windows. This is extremely useful as when putting your files in this folder, you're essentially interacting with files that your windows-GUI based editors can also work with. Therefore you are able to do things like code in VSCode on windows, but execute linux commands on files in those folders.

If you have any questions or struggles with this please post in the forum :) Home installs are not easy because every student has a slightly different environment, but we'll be doing our best to help.

Resource created Wednesday 27 January 2021, 04:14:25 PM, last modified Saturday 20 February 2021, 01:15:19 AM.


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