LINA 1.0 beta
Harald Schilly
exactly what Lina does, but it sounds good from it's description. It's
1.0 beta and might be jet another option to run native linux
applications on windows... ?
http://linasoftware.com/
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS93947+15-Oct-2009+PRN20091015
H
William Stein
I looked at it for a while today, but it doesn't work at all on OS X
10.6 (unlike VirtualBox), so I gave up. I'm dubious about it being
useful for Sage, as compared to what should be possible with
VirtualBox. I also find Lina's extremely limited description of how
it works and what it does to be incredibly frustrating and annoying.
Why do they have to be so stealthy? What do they have to hide?
William
William Stein
Has anybody here tried "Puppy Linux"? I stumbled upon it yesterday,
and have become quite enamored of it. It is systematically optimized
for being "small" (e.g., using squashfs and unionfs very
systematically), and provides a full GUI. It's a lot like "Damn Small
Linux", but is twice as big (base system is 100MB instead of 50MB) and
much, much prettier. It's also somewhat easy to install a compiler
environment into (once you figure out how). I was able to build Sage
from source on it, no problem, since our binaries didn't work.
I've also experimented with creating a squashfs version of a built
sage-4.1.2. Since Sage now doesn't change it's install directory when
running this works. Of course upgrading or doing development on such a
sage would be impossible, unless one uses unionfs.
A virtualbox install of Puppy Linux with VirtualBox's tools installed
(so the mouse doesn't get stuck in the window, file sharing with the
host works, etc.) takes just 300MB. Installing gcc/g++/make etc.,
compilers takes an extra 90MB. Then a complete sage-4.1.2 Sage
install takes MB, so:
Non-LiveCD Puppy Linux with GUI and virtualbox tools ...... 274MB
Sage-4.1.2 ...........................................................................
375MB
Total ........................................................................................
649MB
I didn't include the compiler above, since the target audience is
people on Windows that just want to effectively use Sage (which is by
far the vast majority of Sage downloads).
By the way, squashfs is an easy-to-install Ubuntu package, so next
time somebody asks about installing Sage on Linux and using little
space, we can tell them to use squashfs, which allows for a *running*
Sage install that takes only 375 MB disk space.
I want to emphasize that the 649MB above is the space needed to run
Sage *after download* -- i.e., that is the initial amount used on the
user's hard drive. This means that if this all works out, then Sage
on Puppy Linux (hence Windows) will take less than *half* the space
than Sage on Linux or OS X. Also, this is not a live cd, but a real
linux install.
There are of course temptations, e.g., installing JAVA, jsmath image
fonts, latex, etc., which would substantially increase that number.
- William
William Stein
I'm adding the jsmath image fonts, since compressed they take up only
3.1 MB, which still keeps the extracted downloaded sage size to 653MB.
Uncompressed, they use well over 100MB. Yeah squashfs!
William
William Stein
I was just cleaning up files on my system today and found that there
were several files "lina.*" in my VirtualBox install directory, which
I guess were left by the failed LINA install I tried yesterday. So it
appears that LINA may actually just be a wrapper around VirtualBox?
Which is weird because VirtualBox is mentioned nowhere on their
webpage (as far as I can tell). They also write "... Nile Geisinger,
inventor and Chief Architect of Lina Software's proprietary
technologies." When it comes to software, the word "proprietary" is
a dirty word (to me).
William