Installing Mamba

Need to do this BOTH on your laptop and on a lab machine or ssh.cs

One of the great things about Python is that there are a lot of powerful "add-on" packages which allow us to write awesome programs. In fact, this wide available of packages for Python is one of the main reasons why it is so popular among data scientists.

We will use a tool called mamba to install and manage Python packages. Here’s how to install it.

1. Download mambaforge

   Open a terminal and run the following to download the mambaforge installer from github:

   wget https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Mambaforge-Linux-x86_64.sh

   This will download about 100MB file called Mambaforge-Linux-x86_64.sh into your current directory.

2. Run the mambaforge installer

   The installer you downloaded is actually a bash script. To run it, type:

   bash Mambaforge-Linux-x86_64.sh

   Follow the prompts when asked. Be patient! When asked whether you want to initialize mamba at the end, type yes.

3. Close the terminal and reopen a new terminal

   (You have to start a new terminal session for bash to know about the installation you just did.)

4. Install a new sd211 environment with a bunch of packages

   Run this from the command line in your new terminal:

   mamba create -n sd211 numpy pandas ipykernel matplotlib plotly seaborn scikit-learn opencv bs4 lxml nltk easygui wordcloud openpyxl

   This will need to download a bunch of packages totaling around 400MB. Type Y when prompted and watch it go!

   This might take a minute if you are on a slow connection, but should set us up to write some amazing programs.