Setting up notebook servers

[plurple (Alex Yan)]

Hi! I’m new to the course and I have some problem with setting up.

1. In lesson 1 Jeremy asserts that Linux should be used. Why? Is this so important? I use Windows and I do not have Linux.
2. Having followed the instructions for using Colab, I haven’t been able to get ‘course-v4’ to appear as shown in the video. How do I get that?
3. Having failed to get the files to appear on Colab, I downloaded the files from Github and opened some of them individually on Colab. But all the code cells are hidden! How do I view them?
   
   

[FourMoBro]

I will answer #1 for you, but cannot comment on the Colab questions. The reason for Linux over windows was relative ease of setup and maturity of libraries. While this was a common problem in years past, it may not be as much of a problem today. Jeremy wanted to get the student up and running learning ML/DL applications rather than fighting with OS system configurations. If you use windows, I would recommend giving WSL2 a shot. I wrote this thread over a year ago for those who wanted to run a local server with a linux configuration, but not give up on windows as their daily driver. The performance was acceptable, but not quite as fast as a “bare-metal” linux setup. Again, it was written over a year ago, and could probably use an update, but it should get you started if you are interested in diving into a local server.

Platform: Windows 10 using WSL2 w/GPU

Finally, you can use the same computer to run Windows 10, while coding within a linux environment AND utilizing CUDA operations for deep learning. I myself prefer Win10 as my daily driver. But when it comes time to code, I am usually remoting to a cloud environment, or setting up a virtual machine, or running a separate computer without a monitor (headless) because it has beefier hardware. As of yesterday (6/17/20), NVIDIA has detailed steps to enable GPU processing within the Windows Subsystem …

[plurple (Alex Yan)]

Any help with #2 and #3?

Thanks FourMoBro for the answer to #1, I will look into that.

[darshil_fcbayern (Darshil Jariwala)]

Open the github link of the notebook and replace the word github in the link with github to colab, the corresponding colab notebook will open.
For example: https://github.com/fastai/fastbook/blob/master/02_production.ipynb (Original Link),
Google Colab (Colab Link)

If you are facing difficulty in opening the cells, click on the arrow on the topic name and corresponding cells will open.

[Wright96]

@darshil_fcbayern

Open the github link of the notebook and replace the word github in the link with github to colab, the corresponding colab notebook will open.
For example: fastbook/02_production.ipynb at master · fastai/fastbook · GitHub (Original Link),
MyCardStatement

If you are facing difficulty in opening the cells, click on the arrow on the topic name and corresponding cells will open.

Thanks for help, really thankful for me.