Sage Beginner’s Guide
Remember that you don’t actually have to install Sage to start using it. You can start learning Sage by utilizing one of the free public notebook servers that can be found at http://www.sagenb.org/. However, if you find that Sage suits your needs, you will want to install a copy on your own computer. This will guarantee that Sage is always available to you, and it will reduce the load on the public servers so that others can experiment with Sage. In addition, your data will be more secure, and you can utilize more computing power to solve larger problems.
Before you begin
At the moment, Sage is fully supported on certain versions of the following platforms: some Linux distributions (Fedora, openSUSE, Red Hat, and Ubuntu), Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and Solaris. Sage is tested on all of these platforms before each release, and binaries are always available for these platforms. The latest list of supported platforms is available at http://wiki.sagemath.org/SupportedPlatforms. The page also contains information about platforms that Sage will probably run on, and the status of efforts to port Sage to various platforms.
When downloading Sage, the website attempts to detect which operating system you are using, and directs you to the appropriate download page. If it sends you to the wrong download page, use the “Download” menu at the top of the page to choose the correct platform. If you get stuck at any point, the official Sage installation guide is available at http://www.sagemath.org/doc/installation/.
Installing a binary version of Sage on Windows
Installing Sage on Windows is slightly more involved than installing a typical Windows program. Sage is a collection of over 90 different tools. Many of these tools are developed within a UNIX-like environment, and some have not been successfully ported to Windows. Porting programs from UNIX-like environments to Windows requires the installation of Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/), which provides many of the tools that are standard on a Linux system. Rather than attempting to port all of the necessary tools to Cygwin on Windows, the developers of Sage have chosen to distribute Sage as a virtual machine that can run on Windows with the use of the free VMWare Player. A port to Cygwin is in progress, and more information can be found at http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/wiki/CygwinPort.
Downloading VMware Player
The VMWare Player can be found at http://www.vmware.com/products/player/. Clicking the Download link will direct you to a registration form. Fill out and submit the form. You will receive a confirmation email that contains a link that must be clicked to complete the registration process and take you to the download page. Choose Start Download Manager, which downloads and runs a small application that performs the actual download and saves the file to a location of your choice.
Installing VMWare Player
After downloading VMWare Player, double-click the saved file to start the installation wizard. Follow the instructions in the wizard to install the Player. You will have to reboot the computer when instructed.
Downloading and extracting Sage
Download Sage by following the Download link from http://www.sagemath.org. The site should automatically detect that you are using Windows, and direct you to the right download page. Choose the closest mirror and download the compressed virtual machine. Be aware that the file is nearly 1GB in size. Once the download is complete, right-click the compressed file and choose Extract all from the pop-up menu.
Launching the virtual machine
Launch VMware Player and accept the license terms. When the Player has started, click Open a Virtual Machine and select the Sage virtual machine, which is called sage-vmware.vmx. Click Play virtual machine to run Sage. If you have run Sage before, it should appear in the list of virtual machines on the left side of the dialog box, and you can double-click to run it.
When the virtual machine launches, you may receive one or more warnings about various devices (such as Bluetooth adapters) that the virtual machine cannot connect to. Don’t worry about this, since Sage doesn’t need these devices.
Start Sage
Once the virtual machine is running, you will see three icons. Double-clicking the Sage Notebook icon starts the Sage notebook interface, while the Sage icon starts the commandline interface. The first time you run Sage, you will have to wait while it regenerates files. When it finishes, you are ready to go.
You may get the warning “External network not set up” when launching the notebook interface. This does not cause any problems.
When you are done using Sage, choose Shut Down… from the System menu at the top of the window, and a dialog will appear. Click the Shut Down button to close the virtual machine.
Installing a binary version of Sage on OS X
On Mac OS X, you have the option of installing a pre-built binary application, or downloading the source code and compiling Sage yourself. One advantage of the pre-built binary is that it is very easy to install, because it contains everything you need to run Sage. Another advantage of the binary is that building Sage from source requires a lot of computational resources, and may take a long time on older machines. However, there are a number of disadvantages to prebuilt binaries. The binary download is quite large, and the installed files take up a lot of disk space. Many of the tools in the binary may be duplicates of tools you already have on your system. Pre-built binaries cannot be tuned to take advantage of the hardware features of a particular platform, so building Sage from source is preferred if you are looking for the best performance on CPU-intensive tasks. You will have to choose which method is right for you.
Downloading Sage
Download Sage by following the Download link from http://www.sagemath.org. The site should automatically detect that you are using OS X, and direct you to the right download page. Choose a mirror site close to you. Select your architecture (Intel for new Macs, or PowerPC for older G4 and G5 macs). Then, click the link for the correct .dmg file for you version of Mac OS X. If you aren’t sure, click the Apple menu on the far left side of the menu bar and choose About This Mac.
Installing Sage
Once the download is complete, double-click the .dmg file to mount the disk image. Drag the Sage folder from the disk image to the desired location on your hard drive (such as the Apps folder).
If the copy procedure fails, you will need to do it from the command line. Open the Terminal application and enter the following commands. Be sure to change the name sage-4.5-OSX-64bit-10.6-i386-Darwin.dmg to the name of the file you just downloaded:
$ cd /Applications $ cp -R -P /Volumes/sage-4.5-OSX-64bit-10.6-i386-Darwin.dmg /sage .
After the copy process is complete, right-click on the icon for the disk image, and choose Eject.
Starting Sage
Use the Finder to visit the Sage folder that you just created. Double-click on the icon called Sage. It should open with the Terminal application. If it doesn’t start, right-click on the icon, go to the Open With submenu and choose Terminal.app. The Sage command line will now be running in a Terminal window. The first time you run Sage, you will have to wait while it regenerates files. When it finishes, you are ready to go.
There are three ways to exit Sage: type exit or quit at the Sage command prompt, or press Ctrl-D in the Terminal window. You can then quit the Terminal application.
