Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
Hi, Le lundi 12 novembre 2012 10:31:52 UTC+1, Jeroen Demeyer a écrit : On 2012-11-11 10:00, Nicolas M. Thiery wrote: - Precompiled binary for Linux: besides the usual distro-specific binaries, it would be very helpful to have two (32bit / 64bit) fat Sage binaries that would work without dependencies on as many distros and processors as possible. The pre-compiled binaries *should* work on old processors. If not, that's a bug which should be reported. Supporting more distros is possible if and only if somebody contributes a buildbot slave machine for building the binaries. One possible reason (maybe not the only one) for the binary build to need recent (sse2) set of instructions may be this bug on atlas package: http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13706 It has the effect of chosing HAMMER architecture (btw, where is this default choice coming from ?) when SAGE_FAT_BINARY is set to 'yes', no matter the value of SAGE_ATLAS_ARCH (which could be older than Hammer). After aplying the basic patch (which should be checked/improved by specialists), sse2 does not appear anymore on sage-flags.txt and the build works on Pentium 3. The request about distros is not to have many distro-specific builds that cost a lot but one autonomous robust non-distro-specific build. You ask for contributing a buildbot slave machine for building the binaries, is this about buying a machine or about spending time in maintaining a buildbot on an existing machine ? Ciao, Thierry -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
The new ATLAS http://trac.sagemath.org/10508 has additional generic archdefs and these are used with SAGE_FAT_BINARY now. Also, SAGE_FAT_BINARY essentially means pick reasonable defaults on non-museum hardware for the sage binary tarball. The only bug is that the variable has a strange name for historical reasons. On Thursday, November 15, 2012 8:07:12 AM UTC-5, Thierry (sage-googlesucks@xxx) wrote: Hi, Le lundi 12 novembre 2012 10:31:52 UTC+1, Jeroen Demeyer a écrit : On 2012-11-11 10:00, Nicolas M. Thiery wrote: - Precompiled binary for Linux: besides the usual distro-specific binaries, it would be very helpful to have two (32bit / 64bit) fat Sage binaries that would work without dependencies on as many distros and processors as possible. The pre-compiled binaries *should* work on old processors. If not, that's a bug which should be reported. Supporting more distros is possible if and only if somebody contributes a buildbot slave machine for building the binaries. One possible reason (maybe not the only one) for the binary build to need recent (sse2) set of instructions may be this bug on atlas package: http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13706 It has the effect of chosing HAMMER architecture (btw, where is this default choice coming from ?) when SAGE_FAT_BINARY is set to 'yes', no matter the value of SAGE_ATLAS_ARCH (which could be older than Hammer). After aplying the basic patch (which should be checked/improved by specialists), sse2 does not appear anymore on sage-flags.txt and the build works on Pentium 3. The request about distros is not to have many distro-specific builds that cost a lot but one autonomous robust non-distro-specific build. You ask for contributing a buildbot slave machine for building the binaries, is this about buying a machine or about spending time in maintaining a buildbot on an existing machine ? Ciao, Thierry -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 09:42:04AM -0800, Volker Braun wrote: The new ATLAS http://trac.sagemath.org/10508 has additional generic archdefs and these are used with SAGE_FAT_BINARY now. Also, SAGE_FAT_BINARY essentially means pick reasonable defaults on non-museum hardware for the sage binary tarball. The only bug is that the variable has a strange name for historical reasons. As of today, this seems not to be fixed in the spkg proposed in #10508 : SAGE_FAT_BINARY default still overwrites SAGE_ATLAS_ARCH when it is set. SAGE_FAT_BINARY is not only used for atlas, but also for (according to grep in the sage-5.4 sources) : ecm-6.3.p8 libm4ri-20120613 mpir-2.4.0.p6 polybori-0.8.2 r-2.14.0.p6 hence one may want to take advantage of it and be more precise by setting the SAGE_ATLAS_ARCH variable. By the way, it is interesting to see that, when SAGE_FAT_BINARY=='yes' in sage-5.4, libm4ri-20120613 explicitely disables SSE2 set of instructions and atlas-3.8.4.p1 explicitely enables it. Also, in the #10508 package, configure_base() method adds 3DNow set of instructions to some Intel architecture, which seems not to know it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DNow! Ciao, Thierry -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
On Thursday, November 15, 2012 2:56:44 PM UTC-5, Thierry (sage-googlesucks@xxx) wrote: Also, SAGE_FAT_BINARY essentially means pick reasonable defaults on non-museum hardware for the sage binary tarball. The only bug is that the variable has a strange name for historical reasons. As of today, this seems not to be fixed in the spkg proposed in #10508 : SAGE_FAT_BINARY default still overwrites SAGE_ATLAS_ARCH when it is set. The combination is nonsensical: You either want a binary that runs on all reasonably old hardware for distribution, or you want to specify the architecture in detail. Which one is it? I don't mind adding support for nonsensical combinations if there is demand. But the only bug here is that it requires SSE2 on i386, which is probably too much. Note that the old ATLAS (which we currently ship, and probably will for a while) doesn't have generic archdefs to start with so it always was a crapshot. Also, in the #10508 package, configure_base() method adds 3DNow set of instructions to some Intel architecture, which seems not to know it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DNow! So? Sage will never run with only the original 8086 instruction set. For many of the processors on your web page you'll have to recompile a linux distro from source, never mind Sage. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
On 2012-11-11 10:00, Nicolas M. Thiery wrote: (a) failed most of the time on Linux by lack of gfortran. Since sage-5.4, gfortran is no longer a requirement (see #13515), so this will become easier in the future. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
On 2012-11-11 10:00, Nicolas M. Thiery wrote: - Precompiled binary for Linux: besides the usual distro-specific binaries, it would be very helpful to have two (32bit / 64bit) fat Sage binaries that would work without dependencies on as many distros and processors as possible. The pre-compiled binaries *should* work on old processors. If not, that's a bug which should be reported. Supporting more distros is possible if and only if somebody contributes a buildbot slave machine for building the binaries. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
[sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
Hi Andrey, On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 08:37:50PM -0800, Andrey Novoseltsev wrote: Thanks a lot for such a detailed report! :-) Is it possible to have step-by-step instructions for self-replicating USB sticks posted somewhere? Thierry Monteil, who worked hard on that key and should get all the credits for it, is in CC. He is planning to advertise it shortly. I think these may be a great way to use Sage even in developed countries. Last summer I used USB sticks for our summer school, with a hope that students may use them in the lab (I got our IT guys to open USB boot) and then on their own computers. To make sure that results are preserved between sessions, I've installed Linux on a USB partition together with Sage and LaTeX, tinkered with GRUB to mount only the stick by label rather than UUID, and then used Clonezilla for duplication (which fortunately support 1-to-many image restoration and I had a computer with 8 ports available). Thanks for reporting the use-case! I also hit the problem that Macs don't boot from USB, which IMHO is completely retarded, but that's just life. Yeah. Besides, installing on Mac is not so much of an issue. It also seems to me that memory consumption is the main bottleneck of running Sage servers - when users are playing with basic calculus/ linear algebra, there isn't much demand on CPU, but every open worksheet or interact worker consumes quite a bit of virtual and resident memory. I hope to run a class with ~2k students next year and it is conceivable that most of them will do something a few hours before the homework deadline. We'll see how it goes (if it goes at all, of course). Wow, 2k? That's quite a few! Nicolas -- Nicolas M. Thiéry Isil nthi...@users.sf.net http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 10:28:02AM +0100, Jeroen Demeyer wrote: On 2012-11-11 10:00, Nicolas M. Thiery wrote: (a) failed most of the time on Linux by lack of gfortran. Since sage-5.4, gfortran is no longer a requirement (see #13515), so this will become easier in the future. Great! One problem crossed out of the list. Kuddos to those who worked on #13515! Nicolas -- Nicolas M. Thiéry Isil nthi...@users.sf.net http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 10:31:47AM +0100, Jeroen Demeyer wrote: The pre-compiled binaries *should* work on old processors. If not, that's a bug which should be reported. Ah, good to know! I don't remember myself if we had issues with the processors themselves, or only with distro-related issues (like glibc version). Thierry? Supporting more distros is possible if and only if somebody contributes a buildbot slave machine for building the binaries. Ok. Note that, in the discussion at hand, it would be more about testing generic binaries rather than building distro-specific binaries. Thierry: in case the *working on old processors* is confirmed, what about running a virtual machine with your minimal Debian as buildbot on the sage-combinat server? Cheers, Nicolas -- Nicolas M. Thiéry Isil nthi...@users.sf.net http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
I don't understand where this quote came from because this is being cross-posted ( =.= ) through mailing lists, and I don't follow all of them, but... 2012/11/12 Nicolas M. Thiery nicolas.thi...@u-psud.fr I also hit the problem that Macs don't boot from USB, which IMHO is completely retarded, but that's just life. One could simply burn a PLOP boot manager CD and then use it to boot from USB. The only exception to this would be the Macbook Air without an external SuperDrive. BTW Nicolas is there a specific reason you're planning to use the hackish and dirty Remastersys instead of a pure Ubuntu editing tool like UCK? Results are usually better with it and it's quite easy to customize the system in every aspect before creating an ISO. Best regards, -- *Andrea Lazzarotto* - http://andrealazzarotto.com* * -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 02:10:37PM +0100, Andrea Lazzarotto wrote: I also hit the problem that Macs don't boot from USB, which IMHO is completely retarded, but that's just life. One could simply burn a PLOP boot manager CD and then use it to boot from USB. The only exception to this would be the Macbook Air without an external SuperDrive. Thanks for the pointer! BTW Nicolas is there a specific reason you're planning to use the hackish and dirty Remastersys instead of a pure Ubuntu editing tool like UCK? Results are usually better with it and it's quite easy to customize the system in every aspect before creating an ISO. That's a question for Jan Groenewald :-) Cheers, Nicolas -- Nicolas M. Thiéry Isil nthi...@users.sf.net http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
2012/11/12 Nicolas M. Thiery nicolas.thi...@u-psud.fr That's a question for Jan Groenewald :-) Yes I'm sorry, I didn't look at the conversation list very well! -- *Andrea Lazzarotto* - http://andrealazzarotto.com* * -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
Hi Yes. The reason is I have not started looking closely enough to know about UCK. Reference: http://sourceforge.net/projects/uck/ Do you know much of it? Does it allow 1) to surpass a 4G limit? 2) to do a standard install from the ISO, including creating users, it simply adds extra packages transparent to the user? 3) allow adding of new sources.list.d files to the install target easily? Regards, Jan On 12 November 2012 16:33, Andrea Lazzarotto andrea.lazzaro...@gmail.comwrote: 2012/11/12 Nicolas M. Thiery nicolas.thi...@u-psud.fr That's a question for Jan Groenewald :-) Yes I'm sorry, I didn't look at the conversation list very well! -- *Andrea Lazzarotto* - http://andrealazzarotto.com* * -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en. -- .~. /V\ Jan Groenewald /( )\www.aims.ac.za ^^-^^ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
2012/11/12 Jan Groenewald j...@aims.ac.za Do you know much of it? Does it allow 1) to surpass a 4G limit? Do you mean the size of the ISO? I think yes. The distro I made as a project for my high school graduation stays under 4 GB so I can't confirm it, but you can check it to see a lot of customizations including software, themes, the default home contents for new users and so on. http://www.itislinux.it/ 2) to do a standard install from the ISO, including creating users, it simply adds extra packages transparent to the user? Do you mean pre creating users or creating a single user following the standard installation procedure of Ubuntu? For the former, I think yes but haven't tried, for the latter I can assure you the installation is the standard Ubuntu way, so you can set up the first user account with the name that you want. You can pre-install any software package (or system file for that matter) and the DVD will contain it, so when you install the system you have what you need. 3) allow adding of new sources.list.d files to the install target easily? Absolutely yes. Apart from allowing you to chroot and then simply use sudo add-apt-repository you can also manually copy a file in that directory. If you need information about UCK feel free to contact me. Best regards, -- *Andrea Lazzarotto* - http://andrealazzarotto.com* * -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
Hi I will have a look, definitely, thanks. The 4G limit: http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu.html see the section titled The 4GB limit explained - not a remastersys limitation. Regards, Jan On 12 November 2012 16:53, Andrea Lazzarotto andrea.lazzaro...@gmail.comwrote: 2012/11/12 Jan Groenewald j...@aims.ac.za Do you know much of it? Does it allow 1) to surpass a 4G limit? Do you mean the size of the ISO? I think yes. The distro I made as a project for my high school graduation stays under 4 GB so I can't confirm it, but you can check it to see a lot of customizations including software, themes, the default home contents for new users and so on. http://www.itislinux.it/ 2) to do a standard install from the ISO, including creating users, it simply adds extra packages transparent to the user? Do you mean pre creating users or creating a single user following the standard installation procedure of Ubuntu? For the former, I think yes but haven't tried, for the latter I can assure you the installation is the standard Ubuntu way, so you can set up the first user account with the name that you want. You can pre-install any software package (or system file for that matter) and the DVD will contain it, so when you install the system you have what you need. 3) allow adding of new sources.list.d files to the install target easily? Absolutely yes. Apart from allowing you to chroot and then simply use sudo add-apt-repository you can also manually copy a file in that directory. If you need information about UCK feel free to contact me. Best regards, -- *Andrea Lazzarotto* - http://andrealazzarotto.com* * -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en. -- .~. /V\ Jan Groenewald /( )\www.aims.ac.za ^^-^^ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
Re: [sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
2012/11/12 Jan Groenewald j...@aims.ac.za The 4G limit: http://www.remastersys.com/ubuntu.html see the section titled The 4GB limit explained - not a remastersys limitation. I see. Well, maybe there is another way to workaround the issue. After you've added the required software on the disc, you could use BleachBit and remove all language files which are not English or any language you wish to keep. IIRC this could free some hundreds of MB of data from your Ubuntu system. Also removing unneeded LaTeX documentation can help. -- *Andrea Lazzarotto* - http://andrealazzarotto.com* * -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups sage-devel group. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel?hl=en.
[sage-devel] Sage Days in Bobo-Dioulasso debriefing; Sage in developping countries
Dear Sage devs, The fall school on Discrete Mathematics in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, aka Sage Days 43, just finished. For two weeks we had courses (combinatorics of words, dynamics, tilings, ...) interspersed with on-hands tutorials using Sage. The public consisted mostly from graduate students, from subsaharian Africa and some further away countries. That was a good occasion for a real-life evaluation of a claim I have been desiring to make for a long time: «Sage, being open-source, is well adapted for universities in developing countries». Let's see about this. A couple words of context: -- - 70 participants total; in average 40-50 were there. - Most participants had a laptop (or netbook for a few of them): - 90%: windows, 5% mac, 5% Linux Ubuntu (usually in double-boot with Windows) - Laptop age ranging from 2003 to 2012; 4 years on average - RAM: 500k-6Gb; 1Gb on average? - Network: one ADSL line for 60 persons in the conference center Well, when it actually worked, which was not that often. We finished using a cell-phone shared over wifi. The local wireless network itself was down quite often. No network at the university itself or nearby - Among the organizers were Sage devs with good experience on running Sage workshops and doing system/network administration, ... - Sam had brought a big bunch of power cables. I screwed up not bringing my own wireless router to at least guarantee a reliable local network. Strategies we tried or considered: -- (a) Installing Sage on Linux/Mac with the binaries from Sagemath.org (b) Installing Sage on Linux/Mac from sources (c) Installing Sage on Linux from a custom built fat binary (d) Installing Sage on Windows with the virtual machine (e) Running a Sage server on my laptop (8 cores, 8Gb) (f) Using a remote Sage server (g) Installing Linux and reducing the problem to (a-c) (h) Booting on a live Debian USB key, custom-build by Thierry Monteil with Sage, self-cloning and persistence. (i) Using a local PC lab after installing Sage on them I would like to use the occasion to send my kudos to all those who strive hard at making Sage easier to use one way or the other. How it went: (a) Went smoothly on Mac when appropriate binaries were available. We had to recompile a few of those binaries. (a) failed most of the time on Linux by lack of gfortran. Since we did not have a reasonable network, apt-get install was not an option. We did not have iso's of all the Ubuntu versions that were in use. 3D plotting was usually not available (by lack of appropriate Java plug-ins). (b) Compiling from source was not a viable option on Linux for the same reason as above: build-essentials was usually not there. On Mac that was ok, provided we had under hand the appropriate version of XCode. (c) This fat binary was built by Thierry Monteil on an old pentium 3 (!) with a minimal Debian install. Installation and usage went smoothly, except that 3D plotting was usually not available. (d) Virtual machine: Installation went smoothly on about 20 machines (with close guidance). It failed on 2-3 machines due to resource limitations (disk, ...). However, except for about five recent machines, the memory footprint was just too high: any non trivial calculation or plot made the laptop swap and become simply too slow to use. The french keyboard was not properly self-detected. Due to the network, we could not look up on the web for help. We ended up finding how to configure it from a shell. I'll create a ticket. The Sage version available was a bit old (5.1) though that was not an issue for us this time (but it could have been). The usage was on the complex side for most participants. They typically tended to reclick on the ova, creating a new virtual machine each time. Also uploading worksheets was tricky; it would be much simpler if the virtual machine was setup to access the user directory on the host machine or if the web client was running on the host. (e) Running a local Sage server: This is a priori good short term solution, except that participants don't leave with Sage running on their machine. My laptop easily handled the dozen people using it. However the unreliability of the local wireless network ruined the game more often than not. We have no data for how this would have scaled if all participants had gone this way. (f) Using a remote Sage server: given the network situation, we did not even bother trying. (g) Installing Linux, 3-4 machines: we were of course all favorable to encourage participants to switch to Linux. However, installing a new system always means taking a risk, especially since most participants did not have backups (or even did not have a clue what a backup was ...). Besides we did not want to spend too
