1 Introduction

You can install SAGE either from a pre-built binary tarball or from source. The binary method is fastest, and has the least prerequisites. The source method gives you access to possibly a slightly more up-to-date version of SAGE, and ensures that you can modify any of the SAGE source code and recompile. Also, installing from source should be simpler than you're used to with most software, since much testing is done to make sure SAGE and all its components can be successfully compiled with no user interaction on a range of computers. Thus it's probably easier for you to build all of SAGE from source than it would be for you to build some of the packages that come with SAGE (e.g., Singular).

The SAGE distribution includes most programs on which SAGE depends, as listed in Table 1. These programs are all released under a GPL-compatible license (see the COPYING.txt file in the SAGE home directory for more details).


Table 1: Software Included with SAGE
Name Description
Bzip2 bzip2 compression library
clisp Common lisp interpreter
ec Watkins elliptic curves package (modular degrees)
GAP A System for Computational Discrete Algebra
GMP GNU multiprecision arithmetic library
gnuplotpy Python graphics libraries
lcalc Rubinstein's L-functions calculator
IPython Interactive Python shell
MPFR Multiprecision floating reals
Maxima Symbolic algebra/Calculus
mwrank Cremona's elliptic curves program
NTL Number theory C++ library
Numeric Python number-crunching routines
PARI PARI number theory library
Pexpect Python expect (for remote control of other systems)
Pyrex Compiled extension language for Python
Python Python
Readline GNU Readline line editor library
simon-2descent Denis Simon's program
Singular Polynomial computations in algebraic geometry, etc.
termcap display terminal library
sympow Watkins program to compute special values
  of a symmetric power L-function of elliptic curves
zlib compression library
ZODB Zope Object Database

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