Quick Download and Installation Guide

Not sure what to download? This short guide should get you started. A longer version of this guide is also available.

  1. Determine your operating system. (Windows, Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, etc.)
  2. Determine your CPU type (32-bit, 64-bit or "atom" for Linux and Intel or PowerPC for MacOS).

    • In case you are running a 32-bit operating system on a 64-bit CPU, choose the 32-bit version. This can often be the case for Linux and Mac.
  3. Do you want a source or binary distribution? Even if you want to do development, a precompiled version of Sage (binary release) can be used for that purpose. The source distribution is mostly needed if you want to see the sources of the Sage packages, also known as SPKGs, too. Another advantage of compiling Sage from source is that the generated code may make better use of your specific CPU.

    • For Mac OS X, there is the additional choice between a native Mac application (app bundle) and a Unix-style command line like for Linux, Solaris, etc. Both are full versions of Sage, containing both command line and notebook, but the Mac app has some extra features and is double-clickable without further effort.
  4. If available, choose the appropriate binary version from one of the download mirrors.

  5. Follow the binary installation guide to actually install a precompiled version of Sage. The source installation guide contains more detailed information on compiling Sage from source.

BitTorrent

BitTorrent (or just "Torrent") is a peer-to-peer communication protocol for transferring huge amounts of data securely and efficiently over the internet. This is probably the best option for downloading Sage, make sure that your BitTorrent-Client supports "web-seeds".

Recommended clients are:

Metalinks (Wikipedia, FSM) are XML files that contain multiple download sources and various checksums. Use them with a download manager below, if you want to

There are various clients supporting this:

Troubleshooting

  1. If no binary version is available for your system, download the source version. Note that Sage compiles on a wide variety of systems, but does not compile on every system.

  2. If you are not sure how to unpack the compressed file or its ending looks different:
    • *.tar.gz or *.tgz: Use tar xzf *.tar.gz

    • *.tar.bzip2 or *.tar.bz2: Use tar xjf *.tar.bzip2

    • *.app.dmg or *.dmg: This is a Mac disk image, and you can just double-click it.

    • *.tar.lzma: Use tar --lzma -xf *.tar.lzma

      • No lzma? Perhaps you have xz, that is compatible with lzma. There might also be -J in tar -xJf *.tar.lzma or you need to install an lzma or xz-utils package.

    • If the file ending is different, the Linux command file gives you information about the archive type. (Type file filename.ext at the command prompt.)

  3. You might run into the following issue with a binary release due to different features of your system and the system on which Sage was compiled.

    • (((rhx: That should go to the troubleshooting section of the Installation Guide or (even better) the error message related to sage-flags.txt should change.)))

  4. Ask for help on the sage-support mailing list.