Summary and Setup

This site holds the Practical “worksheets” for COMP1005 Fundamentals of Programming

COMP1005 Practical Worksheets are being updated, and will be linked below when available:

Setup instructions for home machines and mydesktop are given below.

Software Setup

Details

During class, we provide access to Virtual Machines https://mydesktop.curtin.edu.au. You can also use these from home via any web browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc.).

A local setup is often faster, and does not rely on using the Internet. See below for options…

You will need a terminal emulator - an application that looks and works like the termainl in Linux. We recommend Gitbash, but you have quite a few options:

  • Gitbash - an interface for the git version control system, but also a highly functional terminal program
  • Windows Sybsystem for Linux - Developers can access the power of both Windows and Linux at the same time on a Windows machine. Requires Windows 10 or higher
  • mobaxterm - MobaXterm provides all the important remote network tools (SSH, X11, RDP, VNC, FTP, MOSH, …) and Unix commands (bash, ls, cat, sed, grep, awk, rsync, …) to Windows desktop, in a single portable exe file which works out of the box.
  • Powershell - PowerShell is a modern command shell that includes the best features of other popular shells. Unlike most shells that only accept and return text, PowerShell accepts and returns .NET objects. (I found the autocomplete unpredictable, so stopped using it)

If you don’t have Python version 3 installed, visit either of:

Use Terminal.app (type terminal in search/spotlight) and check to see that you have python installed, by typing python or python3.

If you don’t have Python version 3 installed, visit either of:

Use Terminal and check to see that you have python installed, by typing python or python3.

If you don’t have Python version 3 installed, visit either of:

Customising Mydesktop

Terminal window themes

There is a lot of customisation possible with the terminal window in Linux, but we will just look at “light” and “dark” themes. In the terminal menu, select edit/prefs.

Select edit/prefs in the terminal menu
Changing preferences for theme 1/2

Then choose General and click on Theme variant to select dark.

Select dark then close
Changing preferences for theme 2/2

To go from dark to light…, in the terminal menu, select edit/prefs.

Select edit/prefs in the terminal menu
Changing preferences for theme 1/2

Then choose General and click on Theme variant to select light.

Select dark then close
Changing preferences for theme 2/2

Changing the sleep settings

It may get annoying to keep putting the password in each time the virtual machine goes to sleep. The default timeout is 5 minutes, which can be increased to 15 minutes, or to “never” (probably not a good idea). Select Preferences at the top right of the Virtual Machine and then Power to change this setting.

Select preferences and then Power at the top right of the Virtual Machine
Changing preferences for timeout