Configuring Julia and the OS

In the first chapter, we looked at installing Julia. For Windows and Apple, it is very easy: just a matter of downloading an executable and running it; this does, however, put the systems in a “known” place. Early versions of Linux also came with installations for Debian and Red Hat package managers but now this has been superseded by a (zipped) tar archive, which gives the user more latitude on where to install Julia.

Getting Julia sources

Julia sources are downloaded from the following directory: https://julialang.org/downloads. Currently, there are distributions available for Apple (Silicon) and FreeBSD in this directory. It’s worth noting that FreeBSD is a Linux derivative and served as the precursor to OS X. Therefore, the discussion here is applicable to these platforms as well. You have the option to download a source distribution, not necessarily for the purpose of building it, but rather to explore the code and gain insights...