software available

The lab machines run a version of Ubuntu (currently 18.04 as of Fall 2018).

You can see what ubuntu packages are installed using dpkg:

dpkg -l

That shows all ubuntu packages installed. Add a pipe to grep to search for something specific (here python3 packages):

dpkg -l | grep python3

You can also use apt-cache search something to search for something in the list of possible ubuntu packages.

There are also other package managers (pip, npm, opam, etc) we sometimes use, and sometimes we install software from source (see what's in /usr/local).

If you need something that's not installed, you are welcome to try installing it into your scratch directory, or email us (sysadmins at cs.swarthmore.edu) and just ask.