It seems to me that the argument "use the right OS" was quite often in discussions about Windows port, pointing out also that many people have an "old" computer where they can put Linux keeping Windows on the main one, if they are so addicted. Well, I never agreed with this approach.
Windows is widely used, that is just a fact independent of one's attitude towards Microsoft in general and Windows in particular. Some people actually like Window, so trying to persuade them to switch just for using Sage is unlikely to be efficient. (E.g. I definitely like Cyrillic fonts used by Firefox under Windows much more than those under Ubuntu, so I use email and read news under Windows. Maybe this issue is easy to fix, but I prefer to spend my time writing this post rather than figuring out how font systems work.) Installing Linux on an old machine (if one even has this old machine to start with) also does not seem like a good idea. Sage is for computations and if one wants to really use it, then probably one wants to put it on the newest of available machines with the fastest CPU and largest RAM. Besides, running Sage on one computer and doing the rest of things on another is inconvenient (as well as dual boot) - I want to have access to everything from the same keyboard, see it on the same monitor, be able to copy-paste, etc. Virtual machines solve the "wrong OS" and "in-one-place" problems and have some advantages, but may create extra problems during installation, have large download files, have higher RAM requirements and, as I understand, cannot use all the RAM available on the physical machine. You still need to work with two operating systems and two sets of programs (like code editors) if you use a virtual machine for anything except just running a Sage server. I am personally completely convinced that William is right to restore Cygwin support - it is the way to go for now and the easier it is to install the right set of packages for Cygwin and then Sage - the better. If one manages to make a singe blob that will automatically installs Cygwin+Sage - even better. I am not sure if I personally will use Cygwin version, since my current computers allow me to run comfortably a complete installation of Ubuntu inside VirtualBox and I also have access to the Seattle cluster, but I would like to be able to tell my students that they can easily install Sage on their computers, no matter what OS they are using. I suspect that almost all undergrads use MacOS, Ubuntu, or ... Windows, and the last one is significant. Last term I was trying to install Sage on a student's computer with Windows and 1Gb RAM. I succeeded, because I had some experience with VirtualBox and decreased the amount of allocated memory. I am not saying that this was difficult, but it would not be trivial either for someone who didn't use these virtual machines before. So yes - make Sage distribution 2.4Mb bigger if it helps to run it better on one of the three major platforms for home/student computers! Even 24Mb bigger is fine - current "Windows binary" is 2-3 times bigger than others! Thank you, Andrey -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
