At the SIMULATING STARS SUMMER SCHOOL, you will spend a considerable amount of time working on simulations first hand, with the help of the teaching assistants and lecturers, but also of your fellow students. In order to get the maximum out of it, you should come prepared!

All students are expected to install the required software and make sure that everything runs smoothly before coming to the school. If you don't have a laptop, or you cannot make the software work in any way, don't worry, there will be desktops at the venue that you can use to do the labs. However, it is much better to have everything on your computer, so we encourage you to use your own laptop.

In any case, please take the survey on

https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_ewGBOniQ82AV9KR

so we can get a sense of how many of you will need a desktop and, if you bring a laptop, what OS you use and so on.

If you are using your laptop, on the first day of the school you will need to have MESA and ANACONDA installed. In particular, you will need to have MESA version 10398 installed.

If you have Windows on your laptop, please see next section.

If your laptop  runs either Linux or macOS, you should be able to install the last version of MESA by following the instructions on the MESA website:

http://mesa.sourceforge.net/prereqs.html

Please make sure you install MESA version 10398.

After installing MESA, please do some test runs to make sure that everything works. We suggest that you follow the instructions on the page:

http://mesa.sourceforge.net/starting.html

to get familiar with the code.

If you have any problem with the installation, please don't hesitate to contact us. The MESA mailing list is also an amazing source of knowledge and advice:

https://lists.mesastar.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-users

A large community of users is always keen to help.

MESA does not run smoothly on Windows. However, several MESA users have thought of ways to overcome the problem. One of these kind souls is also a TA at the SIMULATING STARS SUMMER SCHOOL, Amber Lauer. She created VMESA, a virtual machine that allows to use MESA on a Windows computer.

If you have Windows on your laptop, please install VMESA, following the instructions that you can find on Amber's website:

https://amberlauer.com/vmesa/

The link to download VMESA on Amber's website brings you to a Google Drive folder. If you cannot access it, you can download the package from:

https://cocalc.stellar-astrophysics.org/static/cool/VMESA_10398.7z

If you have troubles installing VMESA, you can ask Amber for help: amber.lauer@tunl.duke.edu.

If for some reason VMESA doesn't work for you, there is also another option: Mesa Docker, created by Evan Bauer. instructions on how to install it are available on Evan's github:

https://github.com/evbauer/MESA-Docker

After installing MESA, please do some test runs to make sure that everything works. We suggest that you follow the instructions on the page:

http://mesa.sourceforge.net/starting.html

to get familiar with the code.

If you have any problem with the installation, please don't hesitate to contact us. The MESA mailing list is also an amazing source of knowledge and advice:

https://lists.mesastar.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-users

A large community of users is always keen to help.

In some of the labs we will use python to plot and analyze data. Having coded in python before is not a prerequisite, as we will provide Jupyter notebooks with detailed explanations of the python codes.

Instructions on how to install Jupyter are available on the website:

http://jupyter.org/install

We strongly suggest to install Jupyter through ANACONDA.