All the software we will use is free and readily available for Windows, Mac OSX or Linux.
Recommend installing either Python(x,y) or WinPython. These include the Spyder shell, as well as numpy scipy and matplotlib.
For the bioinformatics part, You will need to install biopython separately.
Suggest Spyderlib.
Mac OS X comes with a version of Python, but it does not include the various scientific libraries we will need. Hence we recommend the following.
Install Xcode and and MacPorts, if you do not have them already. Then, in a terminal window, type the following.
sudo port install py-spyder sudo port install py-biopython
For each of these, MacPorts will automatically install other packages on which these depend. The whole process is likely to take about an hour, during which a lot of diagnostics will appear on the terminal. But you don't have to watch, just check back every so often.
To start the Spyder environment, type
spyder
in a terminal window. Before that, however, go to Terminal Preferences, Settings, Advanced and uncheck the option `Set locale environment variables on startup'. If you have OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion) you may need to type
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 spyderinstead.
MacPorts recommends
sudo port -d selfupdate sudo port upgrade outdated
periodically, to upgrade to the current versions.
For more fun, you can also install openCV
sudo port install opencv +python27
which will let you control the camera from Python.
Cell Profiler is a separate package and comes with its own instructions.