Hearing the class for students about using sage, I'm a little excited. As I'm also a student, and got to know sage by accident at the begining of last year, I am just expecting for a more widely usage of sage on educational teaching class in China, as now here in the Univercities of China, more often matlab was introduced or even tought to students rather than haveing it as an alternative subject that students can choose if they want. For me, I don't like these commercial software about science and math related. However, most students just don't even know more alternative free and powerful software in these fields, and there is nearly no related reference for sagemath and so kind software. I don't think this case is ok for us students. And so I'm really hoping that you can make a big hit for sagemath applied to education. Thierry is still so warmhearted, he has helped a lot for me to have a better accese to sage, and now the main OS I'm using is gentoo, it's very convenient to use sage and sage have been working very well when applied to several subjects that I am learning. Just in last week I tried to use sage to do a test over a possibility problem that my classmate asked, sage did a good job!
As for the problem you referred, I agree with Thierry that the live boot media is the best way to have a quick access to sage also with almost all the features included. now I'm having a usb stick with a lot live isos stored and managed by grub2, sagemath is of course included, it can be boot with either legacy bios or uefi so long as the secure boot is turned of or a more complicated method should be applied to handle the case. Grub2 is very flexible and can be used to boot sagemath directly from the squashfs file in spite of the position where the file is located, so the squashfs can be placed in the hard disk and the usb stick is only needed to load the boot process, thus the speed and stability should be of no problem, and the demand for more USB sticks is also sovled( when install grub2 to the hard disk, it's of no need for USB stick). If needed, I'm happy to share the grub2 configuration. 在 2015年7月18日星期六 UTC+8上午2:00:49，Viviane Pons写道： > > Dear all, > > this last week, I was giving a class in a summer school in Uganda, along > with Jennifer Balakrishnan, on experimental mathematics (mine was > combinatorics and Jennifer's was number theory). Both classes were based on > Sage. Let me give you a feedback on using Sage here. > > Conditions; > > - around 30 students > - limited Internet: the university network was much too slow for us to > work with, we were given a special network bought for the school but the > data was limited (we had to buy extra data a few times during the week) > - every student had his / her own laptop. Only PCs, most of them Windows, > 2 or 3 linux (Ubuntu) > - most students had very limited computer skills > > Because of the Internet limitation, SMC was no good solution for everyone > to use. We still used it to do some demos, share code, and also as a backup > options for the students who couldn't get Sage running. > > Sage installation: > > Most of the students didn't have Sage installed, so the first afternoon > was devoted to install Sage everywhere. It mostly worked but we sometimes > had issues: > * hard drive limitations: some hard drive were completely full and VM + > Sage was too big to get installed (also their HD was often partitioned in > weird ways and the program partition was full) > * for some reason, the Sage VM takes forever to load on Windows 8 (which > makes it seem broken) > > Using Sage on the VM: > > Never had so much Sage on Windows experience before, this was a good test > and now here's everything that was wrong and annoying: > > * Once a Sage virtual machine was in "saved" mode, it would usually crash > on re-openning and we had to discard the saved mode (I guess because their > computers were running out of memory) > > * Sharing files between the VM and Windows was NOT straightforward at all, > the Sage explanation were not working (I think you need to change the > usergroup in Ubuntu or something like this), at the end I just dropped the > idea as I could not do it on all 30 machines at once > > * And I didn't manage to make them download any notebooks either, because > the notebook wouldn't take https addresses, so actually I had no way to > share notebooks with them!! (except on SMC) > > * pdflatex wasn't installed by default which for me was a real problem as > I use it a lot to print combinatorial objects (thank you Jean-Baptiste for > the ascii art on binary trees, it saved me a bit!). And because of internet > limitations and the lack of Ubuntu knowledge from my students, it was not > really possible to install it on all their machines (I mean the VM) > > * I couldn't get the VM to show multiple windows and not even multiple > tabs. This was so annoying... Sometimes a student would click on a link on > a notebook and there was no way of going back to where it was before... Or > to open Internet on the VM to download the notebooks or something... > > To finish, one very good thing that we need to keep: the Help link on the > notebook was great, the students were navigating on the different tutorials > and this worked very well. > > Anyway, this list is here to remind us what we could do better. I don't > mean to push anybody but now that we'll have full time developers, I > figured this real life experience was very useful for us non-Windows-users > to have (at the end, what's the point of having open source softwares if > the people who really need it can't use it properly?) > > Also I want to say that despite all of this, the school went really well. > The students were really happy to learn about Sage, they were the most > enthusiastic and motivated students I ever had. Both Jennifer and I were > able to do great mathematics and we had a wonderful time! > > If ever you're interested, my class material on combinatorics is here: > > https://www.lri.fr/~pons/en/eaump.php > > and the whole summer school material (including the previous week) is > there: > > http://people.bath.ac.uk/masgks/EAUMP/ > > Best, > > Viviane > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. 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