Subsections

2 Pre-built Binary Install

2.1 Linux and OS X Binary install

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
Change into the directory just created, e.g., 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.

Note: Obviously we should distribute .dmg files for OSX. The only reason we currently don't is a combination of laziness and that nobody has stepped up to the plate to provide them. Volunteers welcome!!

2.2 VMware - mainly Microsoft Windows

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/
unzip it, drag it to the desktop, and click on the "sage" file in the resulting directory. In about 30 seconds you get a prompt; type 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.

2.3 Microsoft Windows/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

  1. If you haven't already, download and install Cygwin from http://www.cygwin.com/. Note that ``Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows.'' Other than 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.

  2. The file 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
    
    then change into the resulting directory and type ./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
from the SAGE directory. If you want the typeface to be larger and to have a healthy scrollback buffer, type
    rxvt -fn 10x20 -sl 100000 -e ./sage
If you want 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

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