Linux is, in our view, the most flexible platform on which you can work for machine learning projects. As you probably know, there is a really large number of alternatives in the Linux realm, and they all have their own particular package management.
Given that writing instructions for working on all these distributions would take a large number of pages, we will settle on instructions for the Ubuntu 16.04 distribution.
Ubuntu is undoubtedly the most widespread Linux distribution, and in the particular case of Ubuntu 16.04 it is an LTS version, or long term support. This means that the base software we will run in this book will have support until the year 2021.
Regarding the feasibility of Ubuntu as a scientific computing distribution, even if it is considered by many to...
