On May 14, 3:07 pm, Volker Braun <vbraun.n...@gmail.com> wrote: > I don't think that running a virtual machine on yesteryear's hardware is a > viable option. Yes you can make it boot but it'll be too slow for productive > use. The virtual machine is really only useful on modern hardware with at > least 4GB ram and hardware virtualization support (Intel VT-x or AMD-V). If > you have the hardware support then you supposedly can run 64-bit guests on > 32-bit hosts, though I haven't tried.
What do you mean here by "productive use"? If you are computing numerous high-dimensional Mori cones, you will probably work on some Unix server anyway ;-) While if you are an undergrad with an oldish Windows computer (especially in less financially fortunate countries), plotting sines and experimenting with Newton's method for a cubic - I don't think that there will be an issue with not having enough cores/ memory. Maybe 512Mb is too harsh and will interfere with normal working of the guest operating system, but 1Gb is certainly enough (if I recall correctly, student version of MAGMA is limited to 100Mb only) and it is easy to increase if necessary. It is also just as easy to decrease it, but the error message that I got didn't say anything about memory and if it was my first encounter with virtual machines (which is likely to be the case for many potential users), I wouldn't know what to do. I am pretty sure that <=2Gb machines are still quite common around the world and on a 2-core 4Gb 2009-laptop it still was more comfortable for me to use 1 core for the guest system and 1.5Gb memory. On an unrelated note, the 2004-laptop (with an awesome screen) used in the experiment is my primary machine for Sage development and SageTeXing and it works great, although for these purposes I boot it directly into Linux rather than messing with virtual machines. That's the ultimate form of recycling - just continue using it since it is not broken and works fine ;-) For CPU/memory/time demanding computations there are perfect shared servers that beat any personal setup! -- 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
