CMS on Windows ?

[Céline Barrier]

Dear CMS group,
First of all, I hope you and your families are in good health.
Thank you for accepting me into your group, I think it will be very useful to me.
I am going to use CMS for a larval dispersion study and first of all I would like to know if it is possible to use it directly on Windows? (methods tested with good results? do you have any references/examples?).
I have experience with other models, but I am a total beginner in CMS (and I am enthusiastic to learn!).
If it is not possible to run CMS on windows directly, what is the best way to use Linux on Windows (I saw the command bash.exe on Windows 10, is it effective?) or is it better to use

Thank you in advance for your response, If you know documents, good papers or tutorials for a beginner like me, do not hesitate to share !

Best wishes and stay safe,

Céline

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Céline Barrier
+33(0)6 77 13 27 20

skype : oooocelineoooo

LinkedIn page

[Erick Fredj]

I am running CMS on VMWARE+ubuntu on my laptop. It is working very well

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Prof. Erick Fredj
Computer Science Department
The Jerusalem College of Technology
21 Havaad Haleumi St., P.O. Box 16031,
 Jerusalem 91160, Israel,
Tel: +972 2 6751 287

[bexeross]

Hi Céline,

This will indeed be a steep learning curve, I too started where you did with a need to run larval dispersal models, as a windows user, with no clue how to start. 

The answer (I think, but cannot confirm) is that you cannot easily run CMS on windows natively, but you may be able to on a mac (which is also a Unix based system, like Linux). 

The easiest way to start on a windows machine, if that is the tool that you have, is to install a virtual machine with linux installed within that. I used the (free) software "virtualBox" to get this started. There are a number of beginners guides and youtube videos on how to set one of these virtual machines up. Then you can install linux within your virtual box and install cms within that. 

This is not a perfect way to do things; personally I then moved to having a dedicated linux PC, followed by using an HPC that had the power to run bigger simulations (and which you can access from a windows machine using an SSH tool such as PuTTy). But for getting started, trying some things out, and for any less ambitious studies you will be fine on a virtual machine.

If you are not familiar with linux then you will also need to start googling for beginners guides to that too (again there are many guides out there). The main concepts you would need to focus on are using the command line (terminal) to (at least):

- navigate between directories

- running software from the command line

- use administrative powers (sudo) to install softwares (with "makefiles" and "namelists")

- editing text files (although initially you can probably do this in a text editor, but when you are at the stage of using SSH into another linux machine this too you will need to do on the command line)

And you will need to understand (and probably curse) the concept of:

- dependencies (if you need to install one software, you probably need to install several other softwares that that one depends on first, each time choosing the right version to be supported by the software that you actually need).

In my experience the software centre (which is the easiest way to install things on a windows-like linux OS such as Ubuntu, with a point an click GUI system) is not good enough to keep control of which version you need to make sure it will talk to the next software in a chain. However I could be wrong, and maybe others have had more success.

I firmly believe that installing CMS is the hardest part of the whole process, so don't be discouraged, many of us have been there too (others have had better support on hand!). In case it helps, I have previously posted:

- some old notes from different installation attempts (personal notes, designed to help myself next time, no promises they will help but they might!)

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/connectivity-modeling-system-club/67kpxJTIHHo/BTRUPvZcAAAJ

- a set up kit I made the last time I installed it with a shell script that you can try and modify for your system to automate the build process

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/connectivity-modeling-system-club/67kpxJTIHHo/6GruB75dAAAJ 

Hopefully that is enough to get you started. If you then have problems (which you probably will) please do search this forum (and others e.g. stack overflow for non-cms specific issues e.g. installation of dependencies) as many others will probably have had the same issue. If you still can't find an answer then do come back here and ask the us (the other users). We cannot promise we can help, but we will give it a shot if we can.

Good luck!

All the best,

Bex