cool-RR wrote: > I understand it's a volunteer project, and there's a lot of work involved. > > But it seems that we weren't talking exactly about the same thing: I > didn't talk about porting the millions of lines of code to Windows; I > talked about making the VM process automatic and seamless. Like, having > a Windows installer that puts the VM files in c:\Program > Files\Sage\Whatever, and to install in the start menu a shortcut to a > script that runs VirtualBox under the hood with a less frightening user > interface. (VirtualBox is very friendly for such a powerful program, but > still a bit frightening for someone non tech-savvy). > > Thanks, > Ram.
There might be some issues with the license of VirtualBox, which prevent us creating a simple Windows installer, to do everything. There are two versions of VirtualBox. http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions 1) The first is GPL (free for everyone, but with no support for USB) 2) The second is closed source (free of individual use, but not for widespread use in institutions. This support USB, and has other advantages). I doubt we would be allowed to host the second version, yet how many individuals are going to want to install a version which does not support USB, when they can have one that does? I suspect most would chose the free, but closed source version. (I know I did.) Sun give a lot of stuff for free (Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris being two of them), but I'm not allowed to distribute the propriety Solaris 10 myself, though I can OpenSolaris. Solaris 10 is free for everyone - including big institutions, but I still can't distribute it. I doubt we would be allowed to distribute the closed source version of VirtualBox. Even if we could, I do not think it would be a good idea. I just set up VirtualBox myself, and think it is excellent. I'm running it on an OpenSolaris host, not a Windows host, and so Windows has to be installed as a guest OS, which is probably not the case with most people. But VirtualBox is damm impressive. I did have one hitch though, I'd mis-placed the original CD for XP, and only could find the version I'd slipstreamed with service pack 2. That would not install in VirtualBox - it kept crashing. With nothing to lose, I decided to slipstream the version I had, with Service pack 3, and it worked fine. I'm *very* impressed with VirtualBox. I must admit, I've not used the XP guest OS for anything other than playing chess on the internet, but it works fine for that. That's about all I ever use XP for anyway. I've not tried XP with any demanding applications. My graphics card is a high end one with 1 GB RAM, but XP is not seeing that. But I don't care too much. I installed Ubuntu Linux on VirtualBox too, but have not used that. Dave -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
