Welcome aboard, Carlos!
Carlos Westendorp has recently joined the SIE, coming from the IAC's IT
Department (known as SI: Servicios Informáticos), where he led the Analysis
and Development Group. His main assignment is to provide support to our large
user base on matters related to Big Data and Machine Learning; he will also
assist in the development of the new CAT application, which will replace the
existing one which is becoming obsolete and cannot cope with new requirements
and proposed modifications (only security patches will be applied in the
meantime). Also, this coming January a new postdoc, partially funded by the
RES (Red Española de Supercomputación), will start working with us on such
tasks as supporting supercomputing efforts in the research division,
reproducible science, and promoting access to supercomputing for local small-
and medium-size companies and the University.
Migration to Ubuntu
As you know, we are gradually migrating all Linux desktop PCs and "burros"
(powerful Linux servers dedicated to heavy computing jobs) to Ubuntu, to take
advantage of the fact that Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) releases receive
security upgrades for 5 years (compared to about 13 months for Fedora). In
particular, all burros have already been migrated to Ubuntu 18.04. There are
a few differences in using a Ubuntu machine with respect to Fedora, all
described in the document titled
Notes
on the upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
If your machine has been recently upgraded to Ubuntu, or you started recently to
use a burro, please read it, and get in touch with us if you have any
comments or questions.
WSL 2 on Windows
Windows 10 allows the installation of a Linux distribution (the most common
ones are supported, and even multiple Linux distros can live together) in a
Windows box, on top of the so-called Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL -
version 2). This avoid the needs of installing a virtual Linux machine using
VirtualBox or some other virtualization tool, and should provide an easier
installation procedure and better integration with Windows itself. We have
managed to install successfully Ubuntu 20.04 on a Windows 10 laptop (and run
IRAF/PyRAF on it), and while there still are a few rough edges and things we
need to understand better, the procedure is not that complicated. If you are
interested in using the WSL, do get in touch with us and we'll try to help
you out.
pip3
vs python3 -m pip
Recently we have had users reporting installation problems using the
pip3
command, which were "miraculously" solved by using
python3 -m pip
instead.
While the two commands may seem one and the same, there is a very important
point to consider: not necessarily the command
pip3
is the one that
corresponds to the python3 installation and version you are using. Perhaps
you installed several versions of Python3 (for instance v3.6, 3.7, and 3.8),
and while command python3 starts v3.8, pip3 will refer to Python v3.7. Or you
have multiple installations of Python from different "vendors" (say Anaconda,
MacPorts, the one included in macOS - obligatory XKCD
https://xkcd.com/1987/),
and pip3 points to a different vendor than python3.
Thus, as a general rule,
python3 -m pip
should be used instead of
pip3
. Read
https://snarky.ca/why-you-should-use-python-m-pip/
for a more detailed discussion of this topic.