This lab is not worth any points and has no due date. It exists for the purpose of helping you familiarize yourself with the basic development environment that we will be using for this class. It will also help you get your feet wet in terms of using the C programming language.
Having a familiarity to the GNU/Linux is vital for the Computer Science program. This course, for many, might be the first exposure to this OS. I will assume later in the course that you understand how to open and edit a file, compile a C program, create and change into directories, list and remove files.
To that end, it is a requirement that you have a Computer Science department Unix account. The department's machines use Ubuntu Linux, which you may use for your work in this course.
Ideally, however, we would like you learn to take control of your own Linux development environment, by installing your own Linux environment on a computer that belongs to you. If you have a computer running OS X or Windows, the easiest way to do this is to create a virtual machine (VM) that runs inside your real machine, and play with Linux on the VM.
But if you cannot do this for whatever reason, then feel free to use the department's lab machines.
You will no doubt have plenty of questions while going through this process, if you are new to Linux, or even if you are just new to virtual machines. We will be happy to help you with this at office hours.
VirtualBox allows you to run an instance of a Linux install inside of a virtual machine. The advantages of this approach is that you do not have to partition your hard drive and allocate space for a new operating system installation.
VirtualBox can be obtained from http://www.virtualbox.org/ .
People get very passionate about their Linux distributions. If you have an opinion here, go ahead and use the distribution of your choice (Ubuntu, Debian, ArchLinux, Fedora, Slackware, etc), making sure to choose the 64-bit version.
If you are unsure, we recommend Ubuntu Desktop 64-bit, which can be downloaded from the Ubuntu website.
Create a new virtual machine in the VirtualBox program, with the following settings (tweak appropriately if you didn't choose Ubuntu):
- Name: Ubuntu
- Type: Linux
- Version: Ubuntu (64-bit)
- Memory Size: 2048 MB (or whatever you can afford out of the total memory capacity of your computer -- I have 16GB of RAM so I can afford to give my virtual machine half of that, or 8GB, but even 1GB should be enough for this class.)
Create a virtual hard drive, of type dynamic, preferably at least 20GB large. This is a file on your hard drive which will contain the data for the virtual hard drive that the VM will use.
If you wish, you can choose fixed instead, which will make your VM a bit faster, but will use up the full 20GB on your real hard disk immediately, whereas the dynamic type will start as a small file and grow as necessary.
Start up the VM. VirtualBox will throw up a dialog box asking whether you want to insert a virtual CD into the virtual CD drive, which you do. Select the CD image you downloaded earlier. You should soon see the installer come up on the virtual screen. Follow the instructions to install your Linux distribution.
You should install a web browser in your VM, so that you can refer to Canvas, Piazza, GitHub (including this page), etc. from inside your VM while working on your labs. Type the following to install Mozilla Firefox:
$ sudo apt-get install firefox
Or install any other browser of your choice. After you're done, open this page (http://github.com/kini/cs429-lab0) in the browser inside your VM and proceed from there.
This step is optional -- if it doesn't work, you can come back and try to fix it later if you want.
Mount the Guest Additions CD (there is a special menu item in the VirtualBox application for this), and follow the instructions to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions into your Linux distribution. This will likely improve the performance of your VM dramatically since it can use GPU acceleration and CPU optimizations.
For this course, you will need several packages, such as GCC (a C compiler), gdb (a C debugger), various libraries, and other tools. Here is a command you can use on various Debian-like Linux distributions (including Ubuntu):
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc-multilib gdb gcc valgrind tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev flex git
This will install pretty much everything you'll need for this class, I think. If we end up needing you to install something else later, we'll let you know. All the above things are installed on the CS lab machines, so if you chose not to set up a VM, that should be fine too.
Note: don't actually type the $ symbol -- normally when you see
instructions for doing something on linux or unix and there's some
line that starts with a $, it just means to type that line on the
command line, because most people's systems are set up so that the
command line prompt has a $ when it's waiting for input from you.
Sometimes you may also see > instead of $ at the beginning of a
line -- same idea, don't type the <.
First, you'll need to obtain this repository (the repository
containing these instructions you are now reading, along with the code
required to do this lab assignment.) To do this you will use git, a
distributed version control system.
Create an empty folder somewhere in your Linux system, go to it (with
cd) and clone this git repository:
$ cd /path/to/some/directory/you/have/made
$ git clone https://github.com/kini/cs429-lab0 ./
Then all the files you need for this lab will be downloaded into the directory. If I make further changes to this lab in the future and you wish to update your local copy, you can use the following command from inside the directory:
$ git pull
Git is an important tool that you will likely be relying on in many of your future CS classes, so it's important to learn how to use it at some point, though we won't make extensive use of it in this class. For more information on git, check out the online book, Pro Git. I recommend you start out with this overview, though.
There are two C programming exercises for this lab -- one is to write
a simple factorial program, and the other involves a program dealing
with linked lists. You'll find the instructions for each in their
respective subfolders, factorial and linkedlist. If you're
viewing this README on github, you can click these two links:
one two.
First, go to the directory one level above the directory into which
you cloned this repository. Then run the following command to create
a "tarball" (assuming the repository directory is called
linkedlist):
$ tar czf linkedlist.tar.gz linkedlist/
This will create a file called linkedlist.tar.gz which is a single
compressed file containing all the files from the repository. You
should be able to upload this file to Canvas.