Sage in VirtualBox

[William Stein]

Hello,

Despite sage_vmware-*.zip being bar far the most popular Sage
download, we will not be distributing Sage as a vmware image anymore.
Over the weekend I created a Sage distribution aimed at Windows users
based on "puppy Linux" using Virtual Box:

http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wstein/binaries/sage_vbox-4.1.2.zip

It's a 659MB download. However, once you download and extract the
zip, the resulting files still only use 659MB. If you then import the
virtual machine into VirtualBox (follow the included readme), you'll
use a total of just over 700MB disk space. This is *much* better than
the 3.5GB used by the extracted sage-vmware-*.zip! Interestingly,
it's also much better than the 1.5GB used by an extracted Sage install
on Linux or OS X.

What I need very much is for some people to test sage_vbox-4.1.2.zip.
Please test and report back.

-- William

--
William Stein
Associate Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

[William Stein]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 11:56 AM, Bill Page <bill...@newsynthesis.org> wrote:
>
> William,
>
> Did you include the readme ? I don't see it after extraction.
>
> Regards,
> Bill Page.

I've attached it to this email, and uploaded a new version that contains it.

-- William

[Bill Page]

William,

In spite of missing the readme, installation is very easy. If you
already have VirtualBox installed just use File/Import Applicance et
voila! Sage-in-five-minutes. Puppy linux looks nice but maybe is just
a little daunting to the anyone who hasn't previously used linux on a
virtual machine under Windows. Of course you can ignore all that and
just access Sage notebook by a local ip address from your windows
desktop.

Nice.

I'll play some more, but right now I like it. It's reasonably fast
even on a Windows XP machine with limited ram ( 1 Gbyte).

Thanks

Bill Page.

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 2:32 PM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

[kcrisman]

On Oct 19, 2:32 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Despite sage_vmware-*.zip being bar far the most popular Sage
> download, we will not be distributing Sage as a vmware image anymore.
>  Over the weekend I created a Sage distribution aimed at Windows users
> based on "puppy Linux" using Virtual Box:
>
>      http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wstein/binaries/sage_vbox-4.1.2.zip
>
> It's a 659MB download.  However, once you download and extract the
> zip, the resulting files still only use 659MB.  If you then import the
> virtual machine into VirtualBox (follow the included readme), you'll
> use a total of just over 700MB disk space.  This is *much* better than
> the 3.5GB used by the extracted sage-vmware-*.zip!  Interestingly,
> it's also much better than the 1.5GB used by an extracted Sage install
> on Linux or OS X.
>
> What I need very much is for some people to test sage_vbox-4.1.2.zip.
> Please test and report back.
>

Currently downloading.

But question: will it be nontrivial for those using VMWare to run
servers to move their stuff to a VirtualBox image? This is obviously
a very naive question, but one whose answer is important, I think.

- kcrisman

[William Stein]

That question might be orthogonal, since I see the sage_vbox-4.1.2.zip
as being entirely for *single* users. It doesn't have accounts or
anything.

However, maybe you mean moving all your worksheets over. If so, then
it is not trivial, but shouldn't be too hard. You could download all
worksheets from one version of Sage to a single zip file, then upload
all of them to sage_vbox. I discuss this a little in the README.txt.
Obviously it would be much nicer if all files were just stored in
MyDocument/Sage under Windows, and that *is* in theory possible using
VirtualBox, since it supports shared folders (as does
sage_vbox-4.1.2.zip).

I just met with Peter Brook -- a UW undergrad with extensive Python
and Windows programming experience -- and he is hopefully going to
look into using the Python scriptability of VirtualBox to make the
experience of using sage_vbox much smoother under Windows. There is
definitely much that can be done.

William

[kcrisman]

> > But question: will it be nontrivial for those using VMWare to run
> > servers to move their stuff to a VirtualBox image?  This is obviously
> > a very naive question, but one whose answer is important, I think.
>
> That question might be orthogonal, since I see the sage_vbox-4.1.2.zip
> as being entirely for *single* users.    It doesn't have accounts or
> anything.
>

Not sure - how many people run their Sage servers off a VMWare image?
We do, largely for security reasons, and of course there are multiple
users on that, in some sense.

- kcrisman

[William Stein]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Peter Brook <pbr...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> Earlier today I was showing another interested undergrad the new VM setup
> for sage (Puppy Linux, VirtualBox, etc), but to my surprise, it ran
> incredibly slowly on his Windows Vista install, much slower than on my
> laptop despite having better hardware. We got similar terrible VM
> performance trying to install Ubuntu to a VirtualBox VM, so I doubt that it
> is directly related to sage, but it does seem to be related to VirtualBox.

How are you measuring performance? Actual computations? Graphics?
Startup time?

> He said that the performance of a VM in VMWare Player was much better than
> in VirtualBox. Does anybody know of some reason that a new VirtualBox
> install would have very poor performance on a relatively new Vista laptop? I
> will see if I can get some other friends with Vista/Win7 to install it and
> get some more performance figures.

I don't know Vista well enough to have any useful remarks.

-- William

>
> -Peter

--

[William Stein]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 11:25 PM, Peter Brook <pbr...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> Kazuo (my friend) tried to use sage to plot the Petersen graph, and it took
> approximately 2 minutes. The virtual machine took over 10 minutes to start
> on first boot,

That sounds like a typical symptom of aggressive antivirus or firewall
software, which is very common in Windows. What do you think?

William

> and the GUI took at least a minute to show once the startup
> script indicated that X was starting.

[madison...@gmail.com]

William, The install went fine on my Windows XP machine (1.5 GHz, 1GB
ram) It gave me a address 192.168.56.101, but I was unable to
connect. I then closed the window and started from the console window
and I typed sage. It gave me a error message that I did not have the
right hardware and said pni was missing. On my Vmware machine I can
not down load the binaries and get them to run so I always download
the tar file and recompile. Is recompiling an option in VirtualBox?
Mike

[William Stein]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:31 PM, madison...@gmail.com
<madison...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> William,  The install went fine on my Windows XP machine (1.5 GHz, 1GB
> ram)  It gave me a address 192.168.56.101, but I was unable to
> connect.  I then closed the window and started from the console window
> and I typed sage.  It gave me a error message that I did not have the
> right hardware and said pni was missing.

That makes sense. If you have old hardware there is no way this can
work. I wish somebody would fix Sage so that this wasn't an issue
(it's a completely fixable problem).

>  On my Vmware machine I can
> not down load the binaries and get them to run so I always download
> the tar file and recompile.  Is recompiling an option in VirtualBox?

Right now, no. However, I am seriously considering increasing the
size of the virtualbox machine by 90MB to make it trivial for users to
rebuild ATLAS and MPIR for their hardware, upgrade, etc. Using the
instructions I and Bill Page posted earlier this should be possible.
Sorry that it isn't easy just quite yet. Stay tuned, and many thanks
for your report.

[madison...@gmail.com]

William, I just saw the Page note. I can download the 90 MB,
however, the instructions are not complete enough for me to try the
rebuild or the install of the 90 MB file on the virtualBox. However,
if you give more instructions I am willing to test it for you. Or I
will wait for the next version.

For some reason I can't join the sage-devel so I am posting here. I
keep getting pending and then nothing.

Thanks Mike

On Oct 20, 3:55 pm, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:31 PM, madison.mich...@gmail.com

> University of Washingtonhttp://wstein.org- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[William Stein]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:31 PM, madison...@gmail.com
<madison...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> William,  The install went fine on my Windows XP machine (1.5 GHz, 1GB
> ram)  It gave me a address 192.168.56.101, but I was unable to
> connect.  I then closed the window and started from the console window
> and I typed sage.  It gave me a error message that I did not have the
> right hardware and said pni was missing.  On my Vmware machine I can

Hi,

It turns out I was able to track down an old laptop I had from 2005
which just happens to not have pni (though it does have sse2). It
also happens to have Windows XP on it.

When I do

cat /proc/cpuinfo

in the virtual machine I see:

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov
clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 up

I'm curious -- if you do the same exactly what flags do you see?j

Anyway, I've set this laptop up with the sage_vbox install and also
cygwin, so I can ssh into it. So I'll be able to make a new
virtualbox image I think that you should be able touse.

[madison...@gmail.com]

William, The flags are:

fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov clflush mmx fxsr
sse sse2 up

On Oct 21, 12:39 am, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:31 PM, madison.mich...@gmail.com