Setting up and installing TensorFlow

TensorFlow is supported on the latest versions of Ubuntu and Windows. TensorFlow on Windows only supports the use of Python 3, while use on Ubuntu allows the use of both Python 2 and 3. We recommend using Python 3, and that is what we will use in this book for code examples.

There are several ways you can install TensorFlow on your system, and here we will go through two of the main ways. The easiest is by simply using the pip package manager. Issuing the following command from a terminal will install the CPU-only version of TensorFlow to your system Python:

    $ pip3 install --upgrade tensorflow

To install the version of Tensorflow that supports using your Nvidia GPU, simply type the following:

    $ pip3 install --upgrade tensorflow-gpu

One of the advantages of TensorFlow is that it allows you to write code that can run directly on your GPU. With a few exceptions, almost all the major operations in TensorFlow can be run on a GPU to accelerate their execution speed. We will see that this is going to be essential in order to train the large convolutional neural networks described later in this book.