Setting up a bioinformatics machine

Introduction

The practical exercises throughout these resources are designed to be run on a UNIX command line interface to a computer with all the necessary software installed. Linux and Mac OS are examples of UNIX operating systems. While the exercises presented here require relatively small computational resources because the example data is fairly small, implementing some of these tools on real datasets often requires the computational power of a server. The ideal setup would be a Linux server - many research institutions provide these for their researchers, or alternatively you could rent a cloud server. Alternatively, you may be able to run these exercises on a desktop machine, either through use of the Linux subsystem for Windows, using Mac OS, or installing Linux on your own computer.

Once you have access to a suitable machine, you will need to install the relevant software.