Tech tangent: Python on Linux — here we go!

Not even sure I should call this one a tangent, since I’ve been doing a lot more tech reading than drawing and designing lately. I thought I could turn my art into a side gig, eventually growing into a licensing income stream, but that hasn’t been working out. So maybe my other hobby, techie reading, will play out eventually…

With such an interest in tech in general, I decided to try learning Python again (I learned a few basic operations a few years back but not much beyond “hello world”.) Let’s see how long it will hold my interest this time!

Udemy had a $9.99 sale this week, so I bought the course “Complete Python Boot Camp: Go From Zero to Hero in Python”.

I decided, as I am wont to do, to go all in: try to complete the course on Linux instead of Windows. Getting stuck at jump, (“Course materials installation guide,”) prompted this blog post! The course uses Jupyter notebooks, and they recommend that newbies use something called Anaconda to install both Python and Jupyter. So I had to visit Jupyter.org on my laptop. After downloading the file Anaconda2-4.4.0-Linux-x86.sh , I of course tried to double-click it, and got this:

The text editor is tryna open it! So a web search brought me to StackExchange, where I learned that you have to manually run the .sh file from inside the correct directory in Terminal. Success!

So I entered ‘jupyter notebook’ into a new terminal window, it was very anticlimactic to just see a new browser tab opened with …a list of my local folders. But glad it’s finally done!!

It’s pretty easy to write commands in Python and then immediately run them by pressing Shift-Enter. And saving is easy as well. On to the next course module, I hope it doesn’t take as long as the installation took!