On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 6:04 PM, kcrisman <kcris...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Is that September 2009? If we do not have something native on Windows >> then we are in deep trouble. > > The technical discussion above was very interesting, as I know little > about Windows internals, and it sounds like tons of good work is going > on with supporting so many architectures. I probably should have > asked a less cryptic question, though, so I am sorry - here is the > real one: > > Will there be a sage.exe file (or something like that) that my > students can download straight from sagemath.org and use right away on > a Windows machine? > > This would be similar to the .app solution that now exists for Mac > (see #4817, the resolution of which would make 3.3 even more > spectacular than it already is). I can't overemphasize how much this > could transform the (silent) user base of Sage. > > Re: Cygwin, I can convince a few hard-core students to download VMWare > +VMWare Sage image, but those are the same ones I can convince to try > using LaTeX for their homework ;) It seems like Cygwin might be about > the same difficulty level for them as VMWare - i.e., not too hard but > just inconvenient enough to discourage most students. Or is Cygwin > easier than VMWare? I assume it at least doesn't have the downside of > only having available whatever virtual memory is allocated.
Just out of curiosity, what is so difficult about installing VMware + VMware Sage? Let me break this down into two questions: (1) What are some things that are difficult about installing VMware? This is a well-supported commercial product made by publicly traded company with an operating budget in the hundreds of millions (or more), so maybe it is easy to install? Or maybe it isn't? What happens in practice? (2) What are some things that are difficult about running the VMware Sage image? I mean extracting a zip file then double-clicking that icon. What goes wrong that makes this so hard? Of course, I think there are many very good reasons for having a native Windows port. I want to be aware of what we need to do to make Sage easier to install on Windows, both now and in the long run. -- William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
