Hi Viviane,
thanks for your feedback. I experienced the same lack of internet
connection in Burkina Faso in a meeting in 2011 in Burkina Faso, perhaps
with older computers since the VM was definitely not an option (too slow,
but perhaps it is lighter now) so that i had to implement alternative
strategies, see an old report at
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mathematics.sage.devel/62514
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/sage-devel/X1tZa6qyaQE/8CUjpuS7agoJ
The following triple turned out to be very robust in various situations
(e.g. CIMPA school in Burkina Faso in 2012: old computers and no internet,
EJCIM school in France in 2013: good computers and good internet, CARI
tutorial in Senegal in 2014: centrally managed computers + laptops), and
hopefully CIMPA school this summer in Iran for which i have no clue on the
configuration yet.
- Sage Debian Live USB for most Windows users: it solves all the problems
you mentionned:
- does not need internet connection,
- easy and fast to replicate from key to key (including custom
worksheets if you put them in the share/ directory). Since each
installed key becomes a seeder, you get an exponential bandwidth, so
if you come with 8 USB drive installed, you can install 64 keys in
about half an hour from the participants laptops (well actually there
is a command-line that even allows to clone as much USB as the number
of USB ports, but the graphical wizzard allows only one clone at time
because of some security checks that ensure that only one additional
USB drive is plugged),
- lightweight since windows is not running behind,
- contains 8GB of (compressed) software including a very decent LaTeX
distribution (of course pdflatex), straightforward internet connection
(e.g. lots of wifi drivers, support for ssl), a well established
window manager with multiple windows (xfce),
- the key is formatted in fat32 (with a POSIX overlay when booted from
the key) so that personal data (worksheets, pdf files, etc) are easy
to copy to or from any computer,
- knows a lot of filesystems, including vfat and ntfs, so that the
underlying harddisk can be mounted to copy the data directly (but
WARNING: the OS of the computer should be turned off, not only
hibernated since its cache might not be aware that its filesystem was
touched during the hibernation, which could cause some inconsistencies
hence lost files).
- some other features, see http://sagedebianlive.metelu.net/
- Help motivated people to backup their hard disk and to install a
GNU/Linux distro with Sage on it: you need to have a good big harddisk
for backups with big (iso-dvd) images of the distro you plan to install
and of course the related Sage binaries. This option is not to be
implemented the first day, but it is common that some participants get
interested in the use of Linux after using the Live and would like to
have a real install. For Ubuntu users, use the PPA. It was the option of
choice in Senegal since Ubuntu is widely used there, but at that time
only a few releases/architectures were supported so sometimes it did
not work. Jan Groenewald fixed this issue now.
If you plan to install some GNU/Linux distro or Sage from the PPA on
various computers, i strongly suggest to install a web proxy to be used
by all the computers for the packages (e.g. apt-cacher or apt-cacher-ng
on Debian/Ubuntu), so that all packages will be downloaded only once.
Moreover, you should install it on your own computer and use it forst
from your lab so that when you go to a place with slow internet, most
packages are already stored, and only a few security fixes that appeared
inbetween will have to be actually downloaded (a single time). Do not
forget to reconfigure the package manager afterwards so that
participants can get their package updated when back home without the
proxy.
- For the very few remaining unsolved cases (e.g. BIOS not able to boot on
USB, though the USB contains a CD iso image to solve this issue, thanks
to a comment of Andrea Lazzarotto), serve a notebook on the LAN from a
recent laptop. Also, having such a machine serving on the LAN is good to
distribute new worksheets and other material.
This triple was sufficient to let everyone run Sage smoothly in various
configurations, so we somehow already know how to do better in such
situations (though improvements on how to deploy Sage in various
environments are not ended and very welcome).
Concerning the Help link, this is the main reason why i am stick using
Sage notebook over the IPython one during such workshops, i opened a
ticket for this some time ago: http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/17269
Ciao,
Thierry
On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 09:00:43PM +0300, Viviane Pons wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> this last week, I was giving a class in a summer school in Uganda, along
> with Jennifer Balakrishnan, on experimental mathematics (mine was
> combinatorics and Jennifer's was number theory). Both classes were based on
> Sage. Let me give you a feedback on using Sage here.
>
> Conditions;
>
> - around 30 students
> - limited Internet: the university network was much too slow for us to work
> with, we were given a special network bought for the school but the data
> was limited (we had to buy extra data a few times during the week)
> - every student had his / her own laptop. Only PCs, most of them Windows, 2
> or 3 linux (Ubuntu)
> - most students had very limited computer skills
>
> Because of the Internet limitation, SMC was no good solution for everyone
> to use. We still used it to do some demos, share code, and also as a backup
> options for the students who couldn't get Sage running.
>
> Sage installation:
>
> Most of the students didn't have Sage installed, so the first afternoon was
> devoted to install Sage everywhere. It mostly worked but we sometimes had
> issues:
> * hard drive limitations: some hard drive were completely full and VM +
> Sage was too big to get installed (also their HD was often partitioned in
> weird ways and the program partition was full)
> * for some reason, the Sage VM takes forever to load on Windows 8 (which
> makes it seem broken)
>
> Using Sage on the VM:
>
> Never had so much Sage on Windows experience before, this was a good test
> and now here's everything that was wrong and annoying:
>
> * Once a Sage virtual machine was in "saved" mode, it would usually crash
> on re-openning and we had to discard the saved mode (I guess because their
> computers were running out of memory)
>
> * Sharing files between the VM and Windows was NOT straightforward at all,
> the Sage explanation were not working (I think you need to change the
> usergroup in Ubuntu or something like this), at the end I just dropped the
> idea as I could not do it on all 30 machines at once
>
> * And I didn't manage to make them download any notebooks either, because
> the notebook wouldn't take https addresses, so actually I had no way to
> share notebooks with them!! (except on SMC)
>
> * pdflatex wasn't installed by default which for me was a real problem as I
> use it a lot to print combinatorial objects (thank you Jean-Baptiste for
> the ascii art on binary trees, it saved me a bit!). And because of internet
> limitations and the lack of Ubuntu knowledge from my students, it was not
> really possible to install it on all their machines (I mean the VM)
>
> * I couldn't get the VM to show multiple windows and not even multiple
> tabs. This was so annoying... Sometimes a student would click on a link on
> a notebook and there was no way of going back to where it was before... Or
> to open Internet on the VM to download the notebooks or something...
>
> To finish, one very good thing that we need to keep: the Help link on the
> notebook was great, the students were navigating on the different tutorials
> and this worked very well.
>
> Anyway, this list is here to remind us what we could do better. I don't
> mean to push anybody but now that we'll have full time developers, I
> figured this real life experience was very useful for us non-Windows-users
> to have (at the end, what's the point of having open source softwares if
> the people who really need it can't use it properly?)
>
> Also I want to say that despite all of this, the school went really well.
> The students were really happy to learn about Sage, they were the most
> enthusiastic and motivated students I ever had. Both Jennifer and I were
> able to do great mathematics and we had a wonderful time!
>
> If ever you're interested, my class material on combinatorics is here:
>
> https://www.lri.fr/~pons/en/eaump.php
>
> and the whole summer school material (including the previous week) is there:
>
> http://people.bath.ac.uk/masgks/EAUMP/
>
> Best,
>
> Viviane
>
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