> > > It seems this discussion about sage on windows surfaces periodically. > The virtual image is the most practical solution at the moment. > > My arguments: > a) a native windows port is not realistic. > b) cygwin needs constant care and code maintainance, New versions of sage > may or may not build. It has a speed penalty. > c) I built an andlinux version 3 years ago. This was not too hard and has > a good integration with the windows desktop on the surface. Under the hood > there are, like william stein mentioned, possible crashes, a speed penalty > (similar cygwin) and rough edges. The project is no longer maintained and > it is 32 bit only. > d) the speed penalty will also hit other colinux based versions, I guess > it is also only 32 bit. > > Arguments for the virtual image: > The virtual image has almost no speed penalty. It can always build on a > proven stable linux OS, so there is no extra cost for development. The size > should bot be a problem. Although a complete OS will not ship (not even > Puppy as mentioned) with 50 MB, it is possible to build a stable base OS > without desktop (no X) at around 50 - 70 MB - this size values refere to a > compressed image. This has not to be "Puppy" but can be e.g. Debian, or > probably Fedora. A few years ago I build Sage virtual machines around 400 > MB (compressed image), I estimate that today this could be around 700 - 800 > MB. A few years ago there was also "make stripped" build option which > should build a smaller, but full functional sage image, I don't know the > present stage of this developement. >
But running the VM surely has a speed penalty because it has to go through that big fat layer of the VM? Unless we can make an extremely lightweight VM that primarily acts as a bridge between Sage and Windows (via the notebook or command-line). Couldn't we just take a Free-BSD or other feather-weight OS, make the appropriate changes to the kernel or installed packages, and ship that out? > The easiest approach to improve the user experience would be to write a > windows GUI to communicate with the VM over its commandline parameters. So > you can handle operation mode (headless mode, notebook), data transfer and > lots of other things. This could take care of most user inconveniences. > > For the installation process I once wrote a windows installer which > installed Virtualbox (if no Virtualbox or an older version was detected) > together with the the Sage VM, I think it even had some menu entries to > start the notebook etc. This should still work, although it is not tested > on windows 8. > > This is the link to the sage-windows thread about this combined installer: > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sage-windows/yoAcv8W5Fw0 > > unfortunately the download links over there don't work any more... > > To sum up, enduser experience of the VM approach could be improved quite > easily. > But whatever, everybody who is online can use the SageCloud. This should > take care for most users independent of OS. > IMO there are three big issues with the current Sage Windows VM: 1 - It's slow because it runs within the VM (which also causes some usability issues with multiple webpages by the OS setup); this also has high memory usage. 2 - It's too big (I think it's something like 3+ GB) 3 - You can't upgrade Sage or really work with different branches as far as I remember. To have such an easy way to get local versions of Sage running on Windows would be a major help for India, Japan, and South Korea -- when I was there last year giving some Sage demos, nearly everyone had a Windows laptop. (Although now I'd just refer them to SMC, but solid internet connections in India can be hit or miss.) Best, Travis -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
