Inside the extracted julia-1.0.3
folder there is a folder bin
and in there, there is an executable called julia
. That is the executable for julia-1.0.3
and the one you want to start.
It sounds like you understand this now, but just to make sure - âtarballâ is an informal term for archived files in the tar
format. These are very widely-used to distribute open-source software. Unlike .zip
files, the .tar
format doesnât actually do any compression, so itâs common to compress the file after archiving it, which is how you end up with a .tar.gz
or .tar.bz2
file. You very likely want the 64-bit version of the âGeneric Linux Binaries for x86â. You can safely ignore the âGPGâ link, which is useful for folks who want to verify that the file isnât corrupted or tampered with by the time it makes it to your hard drive.
it would also help if you shared how you usually start Julia. One tricky thing here is that there are many ways to install and run Julia, and experienced folks tend to have their own ideas about how they like to do things. That can make it more confusing to less-experienced folks, as you may get advice that doesnât pertain to you.
Running in-place
It sounds like your current julia installation is living in a folder in your home directory called âjulia-1.0.0â. Do you usually run Julia from within that folder (e.g. by double-clicking it in your file navigator, or from the terminal)? In this case just copying the folder and doing what you usually do should be fine.
Using Juno
If you use Juno than you should be fine just unzipping the tarball and copying the julia-1.0.3
directory wherever you want, and then going into the Juno settings and setting the path to the Julia executable to the new folder. Then you can delete the old 1.0.0 folder if you like.
Modifying your PATH
As an alternate method, you may also hear people talk about adding things to your PATH
variable. This is a unix variable that determines where things are searched when you try to run them from the terminal prompt. If you open a terminal in your home directory and type julia
, the terminal looks in the directories listed in your PATH
to see if it can find a julia
executable. If you add your new julia-1.0.3/bin
directory to your PATH
than youâll be able to run julia
from any directory in your terminal. There are multiple ways to do this, so Iâll leave that as a dangling pointer to be possibly pursued in the future.
Symlink to your PATH
Yet another way that is popular, which is to create a symbolic link inside a directory that is already in your PATH
(you can type echo $PATH
in your terminal to see which directories those are). A symbolic link is a small file that lives in one place, but points to a file somewhere else. So you can put your julia-1.0.3
directory wherever you want, and then place a symlink in your PATH
that points to the julia executable. /usr/local/bin
is a pretty common directory to put these sorts of things. The command to do this would be something like:
sudo ln -s /home/gaussia/julia-1.0.3/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia
here sudo
gives you superuser permissions (which are likely necessary to modify /usr/local
), ln -s
is the command to create a symbolic link, and the two paths are the source and destination paths.
Hopefully this is clarifying more than confusing.
Thanks everyone, this helped a lot (Yes, I am using Juno and it works now )!