Personal Machines
These instructions provide help in setting up personal machines with the software tools used in this course. Most students are successful in following these instructions. However, due to the variety and complexity of computer systems, and our inability to directly access personal machines other than laptops, the course instructors can provide only very limited help if you run into problems on your machine.
Also, never rely on using your personal machine to complete an assignment. Leave enough time so that if something does not work on your machine you can go to an STC lab and complete the assignment there.
Installing Alice
Visit the Download Alice v2.0 page and follow the instructions.
Most Windows machines made in the last few years satisfy the minimum hardware requirements, though performance is better on fast machines with hi-performance graphics cards. The Windows version of Alice 2.0 is also on your Alice text CD.
On Vista, after installing Alice, right-click on the Alice.exe file, select Properties, and then the XP rendering option. (If you fail to do this, you won't see anything but the splash page when Alice starts.)
There are versions of Alice for Mac OSX 10.3 and 10.4, and a beta version for Linux. Problems have been reported with OSX 10.5.
Installing Python
To install our Python system on a Windows machine, visit http://www.python.org/download/, download the appropriate installer for the current production version. That's the Windows installer for Windows machines.
The standard installer puts shortcuts to the IDLE on the desktop and in
the Start menu. In order to invoke python from the command line shell, the
python.exe file in the python installation directory needs to be in the
command path, and the installer may not arrange that. If the command
python does not work, either move a copy of
python.exe to a directory such as C:\Windows
(which is always in the path), or add the python installation directory to
the path.
Towards the end of the semester we will be using the Python Imaging Library (PIL), which is installed on STD mathines, but must be installed seperately on home machines. For Windows machines, visit http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/ to download the Windows installer for this library, and run it. For other platforms, you can try to use the source download (please let me know how it works for you).
Installing RUR-PLE
First install Python as above.
For personal Windows machines, download win_rurple.zip and unzip it to somewhere you can find it, such as your desktop.
Then execute rur_start.py. Generally this can be done by opening your Rurple download directory in the file explorer and then double-click (or ctrl-click on a Mac) rur_start.py.
You may wish to customize your Rurple install further. For example, on a Windows machine you can put the Rurple directory in c:\Program Files\, create a shortctut to rur_start.py, and place it in c:\Documents and Settings\All Users.
If you want to try installing Rurple on a Mac or other operating system, or just want to know more about the Rurple setup, read on. The Rurple system can be downloaded directly from the rur-ple link under Package on the Rurple download page. Rurple is written in Python, so should generally work wherever Python does. However, it requiress a GUI library that is not part of the standard Python distribution, so you need to also download and run and installer appropriate for your system from the wxPython download page. The Windows zip file linked above contains the wx library, so it doesn't have to be installed separately. Installing wx Python and Rurple separately has been tried and worked on a Mac (but similarly putting the wx library in the Rurple directory did not work on the Mac). If you get this working on Linux, please let me know.