Welcome to Cadabra Q&A, where you can ask questions and receive answers from other members of the community.
0 votes

First thank you Dominic Price for porting Cadabra to Windows and Kasper for writing Cadabra. Second I have not been able to make it work on my Win 10 64bit machine yet. This is what I did: Installed latest MikTex, replacing an older version. It is working fine Installed Anaconda 3 .It is working fine (1+1=2 using several editors). Downloaded Cadabra 2.2.0 and Cadabra 2.2.1 from this site.

Cadabra 2.2.1 installs fine , but as soon as I load beginners.cnd I get a generic TeX error dialog box, with no further explanation. Same thing as soon as I try to evaluate any cell that I write.

Cadabra 2.2.0 does not even install. It stops during installation saying sqlite3.dll is missing.

Any suggestions? Alessandro

in Installation trouble by (540 points)
retagged by

thx also

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17134.228] (c) 2018 Microsoft Corporation. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

C:\Users\D_Hoy>cd \

C:>cd cadabra

C:\Cadabra>cd bin

C:\Cadabra\bin>cadabra2-gtk.exe

C:\Cadabra\bin>

... didn't change behavior

(deactivated speech recognition, could have "occupied" input fields) (Cortana starts again after stopp it's processes)

I used process explorer to get an idea what's going on in Windows 10. The proceses of Cadabra became red aifter 2 seconds and vanished. After that "runDDL32.exe" was visible in red for a second, which surprised me, because i thought i was running a 64-bit version. I realized, that i installed the first version named before anaconda python and that was 32-bit. I deinstalled Python 3.7.0 and installed Anaconda 3.6 for Windows. The Firewall asked for permission and now it seems to work ...

Ah, very good, thanks for getting to the bottom of this.

Text from installer:

Before installing Cadabra2, you must make sure that the following prerequisites are satisfied:

  • A working Python installation You must have python3 installed on your system with the sympy package available. Python can be downloaded from https://www.python.org/downloads/ and sympy is installed by executing the command ‘python -m pip install sympy –-user’. Alternatively, use an Anaconda Python installation, available from https://www.anaconda.com/download/ .
  • A working LaTeX distribution MixTex is recommended and can be downloaded from https://miktex.org/download - this is the largest dependency.

Better only mention Anaconda Python ?

Yes, we didn't quite understand the mess that the Python ecosystem is in when it comes to incompatibilities. It should mention that you absolutely need a 64-bit Anaconda Python.

3 Answers

0 votes

Please try the 2.2.1d installer which is now available, and let me know if that's any better.

by (83.0k points)

Thank you Kasper. It works for me now, although it had some kind of glitches the first time I tried it. Always related to the Latex printout. I think my Latex install is not perfect/complete (I use LyX 2.2 on Win 10). Anyway it works for the most basic situations like trying the tutorials. Sorry for the delay in answering you.

Hi kasper,

although this threat is a bit older I'm facing the same problems as described above despite having followed your instructions (installing it under C:\Cadabra; command line ). Got a windows 10 64 bit (x64 based processor); Anaconda3-2019.07-Windows-x86_64.exe; basic-miktex-2.9.7219-x64.exe; Allowed cadabra-server.exe to pass through firewall, did that manually. I did not ask by itself.

When starting Cadabra via command line I see both cadabra-gtk and cadabra-server start running in the task manager but both are shut down after 1-2 secs. Any suggestions? :)

Markus

We are aware of this problem, but until Microsoft fixes their vcpkg package manager, will be unable to build new binaries. Unfortunately, the windows platform is not exactly what you would call 'developer friendly'.

Thx for the fast answer, kasper! :)

As the binary installer did not work, I also tried the vcpkg option (https://github.com/kpeeters/cadabra2#windows). Is this also a possible source of error (your above mentioned problems with vcpkg) as MSBuild (from VS) was not located (mentioned in other threats, too)? I initially installed VS2019 but after reading discussions with changed paths I removed it and installed VS2017. But still MSBuild cannot be found when running the script. I set the path manually in the windows environment and when entering "msbuild.exe" it was executed. But when running the script I got the error message again.

  1. Does it matter where VS is installed (c: or anywhere else)?
  2. Does it matter in which directory the "git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg" needs to be executed?

thx for taking time to answer!

Markus

If you follow the instructions for building on windows, all works fine with a default installation of VS2019. I recently tried on a clean Windows 10 install with only the Cadabra prerequisites installed, and that all went fine, provided you pick a debug build.

re-installed all components, also additionally added Python components in VS2019, changed folder rights for full access ("takeown" first, followed by "icacls"), executed "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt" as admin ... and now it builds .thumps up. Will see tomorrow if it was successful.

thx for helping, kasper!

I don't think you need the Python components if you have Anaconda installed (I have never tested against VS2019 supplied Python). And you most certainly do not need to run as admin, but you do have to use the x64 Native Tools Command Prompt, otherwise the build process will not find any of the VS tools. Anyway, let me know how this proceeds.

Running "cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE..." with the additional -DCMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH went smooth so far;

When using "cmake --build . --config RelWithDebInfo --target install", I got some warnings but also an error:

NotebookWindow.obj : error LNK2019: Link to not resolved external symbol ""declspec(dllimport) public: void cdecl Gtk::TreeViewColumn::vbase destructor'(void)" (__imp_??_DTreeViewColumn@Gtk@@QEAAXXZ)" in function ""public: virtual void * __cdecl Gtk::TreeViewColumn::scalar deleting destructor '(unsigned int)" (??_GTreeViewColumn@Gtk@@UEAAPEAXI@Z)". [D:\Cadab\cadabra2\build\frontend\gtkmm\cadabra2-gtk.vcxproj]

D:\Cadab\cadabra2\build\frontend\gtkmm\RelWithDebInfo\cadabra2-gtk.exe : fatal error LNK1120: 1 not resolved external [D:\Cadab\cadabra2\build\frontend \gtkmm\cadabra2-gtk.vcxproj]

You got any clue what went wrong?

Yes, that's the vcpkg package bug. You need to build in debug mode, so wherever you see RelWithDebInfo you need to use Debug.

Hi kasper!

"Debug" info was great, thank you!

Close to the finish line I had some issues with my firewall, saying suspicous file needs to be deleted (some gio-2.dll). After adding an exception to the folder I could not get it running, so I did everything again from scratch.

Regarding Visual Studio: I needed to choose a developer package otherwise the x64 native tools command line tool was not available.

Ctest was successful except the mentioned 5 packages in the instructions (also under "Debug" option).

Ok, final sprint: typing "C:\Cadabra\bin\cadabra2-gtk" resulted in "Fatal Python error: initfsencoding: unable to load the file system codec ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'

Checked on solutions: a) instally Python as admin, b) set path variable during installation, c) set path variable and PYTHONHOME variable manually. Did all 3, none worked. Do you have any advice?

At least command line with "python C:\Cadabra\bin\cadabra2" is working. ;)

Regards, Markus

This does indicate a PYTHONPATH or PYTHONHOME issue, but that's where my understanding of this ends. The cadabra-server binary sets these to /Users/abc/Anaconda3 (where abc is your user name) plus anything they already contain. Where is Anaconda installed for you?

Installed Anaconda @ D:\Programme\Anaconda3 binary sets are @ C:\Users\user\ There is ".anaconda\", ".conda", ".ipython", ".jupyter" and ".spyder-py3" as far as I recognized stuff from Python (as I have not worked before with that)

If Anaconda is in D:\Programme\Anaconda3, set PYTHONHOME and PYTHONPATH to that directory.

Hello kasper,

got now time to get it running. Installation works now :) Used standard Python (not Anaconda) without any specific patch settings and the "Debug" instead of "RelWithDebInfo" option (as you said).

Thx again for your quick answers.

The current github master branch also builds with RelWithDebInfo again on Windows.

0 votes

There is a new 2.2.7f installer at

https://cadabra.science/packages/windows/

Can anyone who had trouble previously please give that one a shot? It should be able to detect anaconda/miniconda installed in weird places, and should also take care of installing missing DLLs automatically.

All feedback is welcome!

by (83.0k points)
0 votes

I have updated the Windows installer to Cadabra 2.3.5. All feedback is welcome; I would like to make the windows version part of the regular release process, but that requires that we have a sufficient number of machines on which it is tested.

Download from https://cadabra.science/packages/windows/ .

by (83.0k points)
...