> 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?
As far as I know, nothing is difficult about this. > > (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? Hmm, I don't think this is too hard either. This is not contradicting what I said, though: > not too hard but just inconvenient enough to discourage most students. Even my research student this summer found it took a fair amount of trial and error to figure out what file was the sage_vmx, as the various file extensions were confusing (don't ask me to say what was confusing, this was months ago and I don't have a Windows box), what to click (Ctrl-G? To enter or to exit?) when to use the virtual machine, trying to copy and paste the long link into the web browser needed to get the notebook up and started, dealing with the fact that on her relatively puny laptop the memory assigned to the machine made the notebook rather painfully slow... That was all fine for her, because I could easily help and it was really necessary to do some of what we needed to do. But I think it would be fairly typical for many students, many of whom have *real* difficulty even figuring out how to find MSWord on a Mac versus on the PC if they happen to be in the wrong lab - not because they're dumb, but because they have figured out the algorithm for how to use software in their situation and haven't internalized the idea of "just trying stuff until it works". So even these several steps make it fairly less likely for them to do this, in practice, even if in fact it isn't hard; if it sounds harder than what they're used to, it might as well be hard. Perception has a nasty tendency to drive reality at times. Now, for the masses I think that the server option is just better for now anyway, and I am quite satisfied with and thankful for that option! But ideally a math, science, engineering, even econ (eventually finance or accounting?) student would download Sage as a freshman and just use it throughout four years on their computer (at least at colleges where 90% or more have a computer), since servers can go down or other networking problems can occur. That's where the .exe package (or .app, or whatever version of this there is in 2109 with some other behemoth company does whatever computers become in 100 years) comes in. But to answer William's implicit question, I'm not sure what one could do to make Sage easier to install on Windows right now (especially since for license reasons we can't bundle with the VMWare). It's probably at a local minimum for now, but that's still massively better than not having it available on Windows at all. - kcrisman --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
