The latest versions of Miniconda 3 and Anaconda 3 are now available to all EECS Research Servers and Managed Linux Desktops, as environment modules.
We have been recommending against the usage of anaconda in our infrastructure for quite a while, since it was breaking the user’s desktop environments on the desktops when it was used incorrectly, making it hard for the users to recover from that bad state. Using Anaconda and Miniconda as environment modules, gives more control to the user on how, when and where anaconda environments will be initialised, removes the need to initialise the user’s shell with anaconda and removes the complexity of manually modifying your SHELL via the .bashrc file.
We understand the need to optimise our Researchers’ workflow and the fact that most of the guides out there are based on Anaconda, so we hope this release will make some people a bit happier.
Anaconda vs Miniconda
Choose Anaconda if you:
- Are new to conda or Python
- Prefer having Python and 720+ open source certified packages automatically installed at once
- Have the time and disk space (a few minutes and 3 GB) – Check your available EECS disk quota.
- Don’t want to install each of the packages you want to use individually.
Choose Miniconda if you:
- Know what package(s) you need to install
- Do not have time or disk space (about 3 GB) to install over 720+ packages (many of the packages are never used and could be easily installed when needed), and/or
- Just want fast access to Python and the conda commands, and prefer to sorting out the other packages later.
How to use it?
Read our guide here. For example, you can load Anaconda3 by typing:
$ module load anaconda3/2019.10
or
$ module load anaconda3
That will change your environment variables accordingly, as shown here:
$ echo $PATH /import/linux/anaconda/3/2019.10/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/opt/puppetlabs/bin:/opt/dell/srvadmin/bin
You can check the environment variables that will change by loading the anaconda3 environment, run the following command:
$ module show anaconda3
Documentation
For those that are new to Anaconda, you can find the documentation for both frameworks here: