On Jan 31, 2008 10:12 PM, Jason Grout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > William Stein wrote: > > On Jan 31, 2008 11:22 AM, Jason Grout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> > >> William Stein wrote: > >>> On Jan 30, 2008 2:19 PM, Jason Grout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>>> Joel B. Mohler wrote: > >>>>> On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 10:13:09AM -0600, Jason Grout wrote: > >>>>>> Now, for the ncurses part. It seems like it would be very, very nice > >>>>>> to > >>>>>> have a minimal admin menu using ncurses or newt (with the python snack > >>>>>> module) or dialog. Each of these has a python module, so hopefully it > >>>>>> should be fairly easy. I've never done any text-based GUI programming, > >>>>>> but I'm willing to try to whip up something. Are there any experts > >>>>>> here > >>>>>> that could give some advice about what to use or how to do it (or whip > >>>>>> something up even faster)? It seems that an interface that at least > >>>>>> has > >>>>>> the options to create a remote ssh account, set up sage to start on > >>>>>> bootup, and set the networking information for the box (DHCP or a > >>>>>> static > >>>>>> address) would answer some of the issues above. In the future, we > >>>>>> could > >>>>>> add to the menu and keep things simple for non-unix people. > >>>>> Wouldn't it be much easier to program and use if the vmware image would > >>>>> start a > >>>>> web server (presumably something from twisted) and provide control > >>>>> panel from > >>>>> the default IP address? All of these configuration things (which don't > >>>>> involve > >>>>> vmware player) are quite doable from a web interface. This is would > >>>>> fit in to > >>>>> the sage web interface idea and also be quite similar to the things > >>>>> that anyone > >>>>> needs to know to set up any old router that they buy for their home > >>>>> network. > >>>>> > >>>>> All you have to do then is start the image in vmware player, wait a > >>>>> suitable > >>>>> period of time, load up your web-browser and go to http://192.168.x.x. > >>>> That's a good point; it would be more familiar and possibly easier to > >>>> use. Are there security issues with this? Having a default > >>>> publicly-accessible configuration panel seems like an exploit waiting to > >>>> happen (even if we have a default username/password). That's why I > >>>> preferred the image being locked down until someone sitting at the > >>>> console opened it up to outside access. > >>> We should install a _minimal_ X server and window manager, > >>> and completely replace the current text view on bootup with a similar > >>> GUI that comes from the X server (but hopefully looks like a native > >>> windows app as much as possible). This way the users mouse won't > >>> get trapped. Also, maybe cut and paste will work. (This is actually > >>> how the sage-vmware image used to be 2 years ago.) A minimal > >>> X server takes very little disk space, e.g., Damn Small Linux has > >>> one and it takes < 60MB or so for all of Linux. > >>> > >>> People should not have to worry about username / passwords > >>> on windows by default. This isn't a problem at all if the vmware > >>> image is using shared networking, which is the *default*, since then > >>> only the local computer can connect to the vmware image. The > >>> only time the sort of security issues that sparked this discussion come > >>> up are when one explicitly changes the notebook to use bridged > >>> networking. > >> The sage distribution by default is also the development environment for > >> sage. Someone (you?) said that this was by design and was a crucial > >> decision in the growth of Sage. DSL does not include gcc or make, so > >> development would be problematic on such an image. Are you willing to > >> sacrifice the development environment on an image for the size? > >> > > > > If I'm still going to be the person building, testing, and distributing > > the binaries, then no I am not willing to make that sacrifice, since > > it means there will have to be two vmware images. If somebody > > else wants to take over, then things might be different. Are you > > volunteering? I could certainly use a break from being "the vmware > > binary guy". > > Well, I'm not volunteering yet; I still have yet to build a good first > image. I was just wondering if you were suggesting going with DSL and > no development environment over something like Ubuntu JeOS with a full > development environment.
No, I'm not suggesting that. The devel environment has many advantages, e.g., Cython actually works, "sage -upgrade" works, etc. That's very valuable. > For now, I'll keep experimenting with the full development environments > (e.g., not DSL). I think the capability of *everyone* being able to > develop and submit patches (like all those high school students in > schools running these virtual servers) will continue to stimulate growth > and acceptance of Sage. I agree. > Not to mention that installing most optional spkgs requires a > development environment (i.e., gcc, make, etc.), right? Quite true. > Incidentally, I'm seeing that although OS image is only about 500 MB, > the total disk space of the vmware files is around 900MB. I've > defragmented the disk. How? Using vmshrink or the tool included in vmware or ?? > I think it might be the swap space that is > taking up the extra 400MB. Does that sound right? Would it be > reasonable to run without swap space or is there some way to somehow get > the size of the image down? You can delete and recreate it (and replace the swap file with a saved fresh one right before releasing the image). Then it has a very small size. It is a very bad idea to completely remove it. > Also, how do you install sage to /usr/local like on the current vmware > image? Where do you put the mercurial repository? I just *built* sage in place in /usr/local/sage/. That's what you should do. Then after building sage in place I shrunk all the spkg's by using the /usr/local/bin/shrink script I wrote and typing something like shrink /usr/local/sage/spkg/standard/*.spkg > > > Jason > > > > > -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
