Installation from a pre-built binary tarball should in the long run be the easiest and fastest way to install SAGE. This is not necessarily the case right now. Note that SAGE is itself a programming environment, so building it from source guarantees you maximum flexibility in the long run. Nonetheless, we provide pre-built binaries.
Assumptions: You have a computer with at least 250 megabytes free disk space and the operating system is Linux (32-bit or 64-bit) or OS X.
Download the latest tarball from
http://modular.math.washington.edu/SAGEbin/.
For example, it might be called sage-x.y.z-x86_64-Linux.tgz
.
Unpack it on your computer in a directory which you have permissions:
tar zxvf sage-x.y.z-x86_64-Linux.tgz
sage-x.y.z-x86_64-Linux
and type ./sage
to run SAGE. You can move the directory
sage-x.y.z-x86_64-Linux
anywhere, and still
run sage
from it. You can also copy sage
and put it anywhere, e.g., /usr/local/bin/
, but
you'll have likely have to edit the ROOT="....."
line at the top.
The best way to run SAGE on Microsoft Windows is via VMware.
(Note: You can also use the SAGE VMware appliance under
Linux.)
There is a version of SAGE which can be run using the
free ``VMware Player". It is a complete Linux install with
SAGE installed into it. You just install VMware player (on Windows
this is trivial point and click from
http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
),
then download the zip file from
http://modular.math.washington.edu/SAGEbin/vmware/
sage
and you're running SAGE
in a nice GUI, and have access to the SAGE docs via firefox (and also
much safer access to the Internet than directly under windows).
Read the docs in the zip file for more about how to use the virtual
machine. Type upgrade() from within SAGE in the virtual
machine and SAGE will be upgraded to the latest version.
When you exit and restart the SAGE machine it starts up exactly where you left off (with all windows as they were), even if you restart your computer.
Any positive or negative reports on how well this works (or doesn't)
would be greatly appreciated (email the sage-forum or
wstein@gmail.com
). There are more instructions at the above
website in the README.txt file. In particular, you can very easily
install a wide range of tools (e.g., emacs, KDE, Gnome, latex, etc.)
into the virtual machine by typing just a single line.
For pure CPU-bound computation SAGE via VMware seems to be about 20% slower than using SAGE in Cygwin. For computations that involve opening new processes (via the interfaces, e.g., to GAP, PARI, etc.), VMware is much faster than Cygwin.
Note:
As of 2006-04-13, the default SAGE might build fine, but will
not actually work with the cygwin1.dll
version
1.5.19-4. You must use the older cygwin1.dll version
1.5.18-x. (Cygwin is one of the Cygwin packages, and you can select
this older version. But watch out - if you install anything new in
Cygwin it will switch back to the new version.) Unfortunately,
installing the older cygwin will break lots of things in cygwin. We
are sorry about this and we are working with Cygwin to resolve the
problem.
Installation Instructions
clisp
(needed for making Maxima) and gnuplot
(for plotting),
you don't need any particular Cygwin packages,
besides the standard ones. But get rxvt
(unders
shells) since it gives you a vastly better terminal
than the default. You might as well get Cygwin's octave
package
as well, since SAGE has an interface to octave
.
sage-x.y.z-i686-CYGWIN_NT-5.1.tgz
, which you
download from http://modular.math.washington.edu/SAGEbin,
contains a pre-built version of SAGE that can be
decompressed into a Cygwin directory and run from there. Just
download this file, place it in your Cygwin home directory, type
tar zxvf sage-x.y.z-i686-CYGWIN_NT-5.1.tgz
./sage
to
run SAGE.
Use rxvt for vastly better copy, paste and scrollback
The standard windows command program that you type into when using
Cygwin is really crappy. Cut and paste, history buffers, etc. suck.
To remedy this install rxvt
(just rerun Cygwin's setup.exe, and select
rxvt
under "Shells"). Once you've installed rxvt
, to run SAGE in
rxvt
, type
rxvt -e ./sage
rxvt -fn 10x20 -sl 100000 -e ./sage
rxvt
to be your default Cygwin console, use e.g.,
Windows notepad to edit
C:\cygwin\cygwin.bat
(if you installed cygwin in
C:\cygwin
)
and make it exactly like this:
C: chdir c:\cygwin\bin set SHELL=/bin/bash rxvt --loginShell -sr -fn 10x20 -sl 100000
See About this document... for information on suggesting changes.