I'm using a x86_64 linux virtual machine:
$ uname -ms
Linux x86_64
If you're running on a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1/M2) you'll need to look for
ways to run x86_64 images. I can suggest looking at
UTM or finch,
which are free and open source software that can run emulated virtual machines
across architectures. In particular, if the output of your uname -ms command
is Darwin arm64 or Linux arm64, you can do the first exercises, but you will
have trouble completing the compiler assignments, as we will be generating
x86_64 assembly, and producing linux elf x86_64 executables.
I'm using Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish (22.04), which has long term support for at least 5 years.
I'll install ocaml, and the opam package manager, which we can use to manage our ocaml environment. I also install build-essential to get make, gcc, and other tools for compiling.
$ sudo apt-get install --yes build-essential opam ocaml
Now we can setup opam:
$ opam init --yes --shell-setup
$ eval $(opam env --switch=default)
Because I'm a troglodyte, I'll be using emacs a lot, so I'll install emacs and setup ocaml support for emacs. You don't have to use emacs (it's a pain to learn), but you should look into how to setup your own editor to work with ocaml source code.
$ sudo apt-get install --yes emacs-nox
$ opam --yes user-setup install
Opam will set up multiple editors if it can find them in your path. In my case it setup both emacs and vi.
In class I'll be doing a lot of testing and live-coding. Plain ocaml is kind of spare, so I'll install utop, which is a tool for writing ocaml code at the command line:
$ opam --yes install utop
Later on, we'll be installing more tools with opam.