Hi, I just want to thank bsdz for responding, and emphasize that the point of this thread is mainly to see what options there are to make the VMware-sage experience much better, while we wait for the native windows port. There are likely many "highly annoying" issues people have with the vmware image that might be fully solvable with a little work.
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 12:31 PM, bsdz <blai...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > I feel one fairly big problem with the VMware installation is the > sheer size of the binary to download. If we used zip for the native windows version, then the size would be almost exactly the same. What makes the VMware version big is almost entirely that Sage is big. Probably the Sage/vmware machine should switch to using 7zip but bundled as an .exe so that users don't have to install 7zip (yes, 7zip is supposed to support this). Then the download size would be < 400MB. Also, the sage/vmware install includes a full latex system -- we could delete that saving probably at least 60MB of download size. We'll never get below about 350MB, since that's the size of Sage on linux already. Sage is a big problem. Of course, the MATLAB download is over 3 GB (!) (most of that is videos, data sets, etc.) > Other issues are performance; > running a Sage server in a VMware session is noticeable slower than > connecting to an on-line Linux version. For *raw computations* (cpu bound code, e.g., computing determinants, solving systems, etc.) VMware Sage is likely mostly going to be faster than a native windows port, especially on modern processors. The main speed loss is in the user interface, since that goes via a virtual network connection. One potential speed loss is because by default the VMware machine is configured to use 320MB of ram -- changing this involves changing a number in a text file that is in sage-vmware-*.zip. Do you have any precise benchmarks? > Then there are some practical > problems such as accessing the VMware file-system. After some playing > around I managed to find a way to SSH to the server and see the files > that way. This is a significantly annoying problem, but there is a way around it. One can actually just mount any native Windows filesystems in vmware if you read the vmware instructions. It's called using "VMware shared folders". This can be setup in VMware player without having to pay any money. Somebody else remarks that we can't ship VMware player and Sage bundled together. This is not quite true. One *can* as long as one gets permission from VMware. VirtualBox is also getting very good, by all accounts, and there are likely similar solutions to the problems listed above for VirtualBox. >From a developer point of view, the biggest problem with using VMware for Sage on Windows is that it would be difficult to make it interoperate with programs like Microsoft Excel or other natives windows code. Even that isn't impossible, since it could be done via a network connection and some native windows library that abstracts away that network connection from the API. -- 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
