2. VS Code Setup

VS Code is a source code editor that is useful for writing and debugging code. For Xprize, we shall use it as the platform to run some of the Machine Learning (ML) Classifiers.

Installation of VS Code

To download VS Code, go to the official website and download the appropriate version for your OS platform.

Once downloaded, double click it to install the editor on your OS.

Integrating WSL2 and VS Code

If running a Windows laptop, one can launch VS Code from the WSL2 terminal. This will be the preferred approach for launching VS Code from our Ubuntu folder that comes with WSL2 installation.

Go to the searchbar and type wsl. An icon similar to a penguin and with a bluish background will appear. Click on it.

A terminal will appear, like below:

The above terminal contains the username, in this case sammigachuhi and the values after @, that is gachuhi refers to the name of your laptop account.

The path to the Ubuntu folder in which WSL2 runs on is Ubuntu\home\<username-provided-during-ubuntu-installation. eg Ubuntu\home\sammigachuhi where sammigachuhi is the root folder where WSL2 operates from.

Type ls within the terminal. This will list the folders within your Ubuntu folder. In my case I have three: github4, mygithub and snap. However, in case you are starting from a clean slate, you may have to create a folder using the mkdir command.

Therefore, assuming we want to start from ground zero, let’s create a new folder called xprize using the WSL2 terminal.

To create a new folder use the mkdir command followed by the name of the folder. For example, to create the xprize folder, we will type in:

mkdir xprize/

Congratulations! You have created your first folder inside Ubuntu entirely using code!

Type, ls and you will see your xprize folder as part of the list in case you had other folders already existing.

To go into the xprize folder, type cd <name-of-folder> in this case xprize. You now get the gist. A command, such as cd or mkdir is followed by an argument. To get into xprize folder, type:

cd xprize/

Then to launch VS Code from within this folder, type code . Note the dot (.)!

Your VS Code should launch immediately. Note that in the top left, which is the Explorer tab, it shows the xprize folder from which VS Code is running in. The terminal should also display the same. Finally, the terminal we will be using is known as bash. Some computers use zsh but for windows it is bash. Bash is a text based user interface system for interacting with your OS.