Hi all, I've been working for a few weeks on an installer for Sage on Windows, which takes advantage of Docker to accomplish this.* The goal of this project is to make it possible to run Sage on Windows with as much transparency as possible, such that the user isn't really aware that there is any virtualization involved. As you can read in my report for the OpenDreamKit project on Docker containers [1] there are limits to this.
However, in the ideal case a user simply downloads and runs an executable--clicks through a graphical install wizard, and then gets a desktop icon which launches a Jupyter notebook (with sage and terminal support) in their default web browser. Although there are still a few rough edges [2] the alpha version of the Sage for Windows installer that I have for you today does just that: https://github.com/embray/sage-windows/releases/download/v1a1/SageMath-7.0-1a1-fat.exe My hope is for this to eventually be adopted into the SageMath project as the "official" distribution for Windows, replacing the existing VM-based solution as I believe that this gives an overall lighter-weight and more transparently "native" user experience. In the future the same approach could also be adopted--I think--to provide a "local" installation of SMC. Now, if anyone with access to a Windows machine (Windows 7 or newer), it would be a big favor if I could get a few testers to bang this around a bit and see what breaks and what works and what could be improved. To be clear, right now it only supports running the notebook, though I'm also working on making it possible to run `sage` at a Windows command prompt (almost working). Also be aware if you try to test this: The biggest limitation for now (as described also in [1]) is that for Docker on Windows hardware virtualization support is required to be enabled. If this is not enabled the most likely outcome is that the installer will fail with an error message like "Could not start Docker VM". In this case you will have to grub around in your BIOS settings to find hardware assisted virtualization support--this of course is going to be the most difficult aspect of making this available to "average" users. A workaround may be possible but I'm not sure yet. Be aware also that the installer can take a few minutes to run (as much as 5 minutes even on a reasonably fast machine) mostly due to it being highly compressed. Anyways, I look forward to your questions and feedback! Thanks, Erik * I'm aware of the irony that I only just recently chided someone on this list for appearing dismissive of working on native Windows support for sage, while at the same time promoting a VM based solution for Windows :) Nonetheless I intend this only to be a temporary solution, albeit a nicer solution than currently exists for Windows. [1] https://github.com/OpenDreamKit/OpenDreamKit/wiki/D3.1-Virtual-images-and-containers#sagemath [2] https://github.com/embray/sage-windows/issues -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
