Thanks to Phil, Rob and Wolfram for help so far. I was completely distracted yesterday by the delivery of a new keyboard (7-octave variety), but seem to have made some progress.
Phil's Yum prescription was helpful. The amazon repositories don't have SML, but do contain a satisfactory openmotif. As it happens there is lots of other development software not installed so I added "Development tools" and "Development Libraries" groups, though most of what they provide I don't need. As to what I am trying to do, certainly there is no intent to provide a service of any kind, just to use the cloud for my own development work, if that proved satisfactory. ProofPower is in my mind a development tool, and as such would not be deployed in anything which looked like an application. The most useful thing one could do in the cloud to support ProofPower users would probably be to provide an AMI (Amazon Machine Interface) with ProofPower already installed so that anyone wanting to run ProofPower in the cloud could pick up a working environment and then add to it whatever else he wanted to work with. In theory Rob could make that into a "product" for which they could charge (by the hour), but presumably that would only be for the extra bits like DAZ which don't come in the opensource distribution. As far as collaborative projects are concerned, I would have thought that a collaboration would center around a common source repository (in the cloud perhaps) rather than on trying to share a ProofPower database, which surely wouldn't work. Anyway, as one would hope, installing ProofPower on AWS presents no special problems. Running it interactively is not quite so simple but the simplest method mentioned by Rob really is simple and does actually work for xpp. (that is: just add -X to the ssh command for connecting to the remote image and then invoke xpp on the remote as normal). As Phil remarks, this picks up both the source files and the ProofPower databases in the cloud, which is what I was looking for. For some reason it doesn't work for emacs, which complains of being on a dumb terminal and cops out. If anyone knows how to persuade emacs to use the X-server that would be nice (just telling it the display doesn't do the trick). Xpp seems to run OK, though the performance is very variable. Some of this will be due to running in the AWS free layer, which presumably gets lesser priority than anything which is actually paid for. As it is one would not want to use it for real. Following Wolfram's advice I have been trying to get vnc running, which sounds like the right thing to do to get best performance interactively. I had a bit of difficulty finding and chosing VNC software (a lot of it seems to be windows only). The first problem was that tightVNC is now Windows only, but I eventually realised that TigerVNC is a split off tightVNC and is the linux version. Part of my dismay about the complexity arose from looking at some software which was just libraries for developers of VNC servers and clients and not realising that it was not actually supplying any servers or clients and was just targeted at the developers. Anyway I have tigerVNC up and running on the (AWS) server but can't get the client to work. Wolfram's scripts, though I installed them all, seem unlikely to work because of the changes from tightvnc to tigerVNC. Right now I'm wondering whether I have the client and server software in the right places. Should it be the TigerVNC server out there in the cloud and the client here on earth, or the other way round? I guess I'm running clients up there which use an X11 server down here? Roger _______________________________________________ Proofpower mailing list Proofpower@lemma-one.com http://lemma-one.com/mailman/listinfo/proofpower_lemma-one.com
