OSCAR is currently under heavy development, so all parts
change continuously. If you encounter any trouble while following
the steps outlined below, feel free to contact us via
GitHub discussion,
our issue tracker,
or by sending an email to oscar@oscar-system.org.
Step 1: Install prerequisites
The following instructions assume that you are at least somewhat familiar with using a
terminal interface.
The installation steps (specifically the precompliation) requires at least 4GB of free memory.
Windows
Please install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) following the official instructions. You should now have an App "Ubuntu" in your start menu (run "explorer.exe ." in the Ubuntu terminal to open the current folder in the Windows File Explorer). You can now follow the instructions for Ubuntu.
Recall that your WSL Subsystem should have at least 4GB of free memory for the installation step (specifically, the precompilation). Please consult the official instructions to learn how to adjust your WSL.
macOS
If you are using macOS 10.12 or newer, you need to install the Xcode command
line tools, as explained in the following instructions.
Launch a Terminal and copy and paste the command xcode-select --install, then press enter.
A window will appear asking you: The xcode-select command requires
the command line developer tools. Would you like to install the tools
now?. Confirm this by clicking Install.
Wait for this to complete; it needs to download about 130 MB of data.
You can verify that everything worked verifying the
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/ exists and
contains executables such as clang and clang++,
the C and C++ compiler.
Ubuntu or Debian
If you are using Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic" or newer, or Debian 10 "Buster" or newer, proceed as follows:
Enter these commands into a terminal (this will prompt for your password
and requires that you have permissions to administer your computer).
Fedora
If you are using Fedora 28 or newer,
enter the following commands into a terminal (this will prompt for your password
and requires that you have permissions to administer your computer).
Other or older operating systems supported by Julia
We do not provided official support for other such systems at this time. But
if you wish to try anyway, you will need to install at least GNU make, and a
fairly recent C++ compiler supporting the C++17 standard.
Suitable compilers include
GNU C/C++ compiler (gcc) version 7 or newer,
Clang C/C++ compiler version 5 or newer,
Intel C/C++ Compiler (icc) version 19.0 or newer.
Step 2: Install Julia
OSCAR requires at least Julia 1.6.0, but we recommend running it with the latest stable Julia release.
WARNING:
Windows users should not install the Julia version for Windows.
Instead, please install the Linux version inside Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
Linux and macOS users should generally not install the Julia version
provided by their package manager (e.g., `apt`, `pac`, `dnf`, `homebrew`, ...), as in many cases,
these Julia version are either outdated, or crippled, or both.
We recommend installing Julia via juliaup
which makes it easy to install and update Julia. For advanced users it can also
manage multiple Julia versions in parallel. Just enter
This will run for a few minutes. From then on, you can start Julia, then type using Oscar
and press enter to use OSCAR. The result should look something like this:
If you are a GAP user and have installed loaded OSCAR in a Julia session as
described above, you can at any time switch back and forth between the Julia prompt
and a GAP prompt, by using the command GAP.prompt():
IJulia can be installed by following its
installation page.
Note that in some cases, IJulia must be “built” explicitly, see
the trouble shooting page.
If you try to open an existing notebook (stored in a “.ipynb” file), it might refer to an
older Julia version, resulting in a “Kernel error”; the solution is then to select
a different kernel from the menu.
If you are using OSCAR in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, you will require a browser
in your subsystem. This can be a probem as the default subsystem is Ubuntu and Ubuntu
installs browsers via snap which is disabled for subsystems. To circumvent this problem,
please see how to install browsers via deb.
System-wide installation of Oscar
It is possible to install Oscar and its cornerstones only once on your system,
and to let several people use this installation.
For that, the following bash scripts can be used.
(Users of such a system-wide installation may run into Julia errors
if they have already installed some dependencies of Oscar in their
~/.julia/packages, or if they add them later on.)
Install Oscar system-wide,
or update the system-wide installation of Oscar when a new version is available.
Enter the following commands into a file (for example oscar_systemwide_install),
adjust the paths for the variables julia_for_oscar and central_depot,
and then run the script in a terminal (with administrator rights).
Call Julia such that the system-wide installation of Oscar gets loaded
when the user enters using Oscar in the Julia session.
Enter the following commands into a file (for example julia_with_oscar),
adjust the paths for the variables julia_for_oscar and central_depot,
and then run the script in a terminal (not with administrator rights).