#159 Virtual images that are easier to use for wavepacket users

[Ulf Lorenz]

What and Why

There are currently images for a Virtual machine that you can use to compile and run Wavepacket. However, they are still a bit cumbersome to use:

• You need to do quite some things to get them to work
• They are poorly integrated into the host system

Suggestion: Use Vagrant to setup a standard box. The advantage of Vagrant is that all the setup including the compilation of Wavepacket itself can be encapsulates in a call to "vagrant up".

Acceptance criteria

• There is a simple way to setup a Virtual Machine
  The machine updates / downloads everything and builds libtensor and Wavepacket
  The machine can be easily configured to set the directory to share with the host system
  Plug&Play, no manual configuration is needed by the user
  The machine has a GUI (to show matplotlib plots)
  ** The machine is integrated into the host system (clipboard, in particular)
• There is a sufficiently prominent documentation on how to use this virtual machine.
• The machine has been verified to work on Windows and Linux, maybe with a hallway usability test by Burkhard
• The virtual machine images have been retired, the documentation is updated everywhere that the images are retired.

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Added a Vagrantfile that sets up a system and downloads / installs all dependencies and WavePacket itself. You can then fire up a Jupyter notebook server in the VM to be used from the host system. Some issues remain (something else than Jupyter notebooks? plotting does not work as it should), but altogether a very pleasant result until the Windows package.

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Old stuff

Altogether, the images are fine and a good solution for developers, but less useful for users. The idea here would be to introduce a new image that makes the life way more simple for users. As a side effect, this may also completely obsolete the Windows build (issue [#100]).

The basic idea is to set up a whole Linux installation of a python environment. There is one disk image missing where the WavePacket code finally lives.

The user then downloads this image, and an additional, version-specific image that holds the wavepacket code. Or maybe a Debian package, not quite sure, and has a complete working system. All he has to do then is some minor tweaking, for example setting the host system directory that is shared with guest system or the keyboard layout.

Done properly, the user could then work with the Wavepacket image almost as she would with a native installation, and have all the output immediately available in the local system.