Update installation instructions

iver56 commented 8 years ago

I tried to install brainstorm on a fresh Ubuntu-instance, and some steps failed. I've updated the installation steps according to what worked for me.

Kaixhin commented 8 years ago

Concurs with what I have. May also need six upgraded, but that doesn't need to be documented.

iver56 commented 8 years ago

Yeah, I noticed problems with the version of six as well, but didn't write that down. I guess that should be changed in requirements.txt instead, right?

flukeskywalker commented 8 years ago

Thanks! I would not recommend installing the python packages system-wide with sudo though. It's better to install in a virtualenv, which many people already use, and keeps things clean.

iver56 commented 8 years ago

Good point. I usually use virtualenv when installing things on my laptop, but this time I just wanted to try brainstorm on a temporary virtual machine running Ubuntu, so I didn't worry about keeping things clean. It's a valid use case, though, so people might benefit from having a tutorial for it. At least I know I would like that, because I just spent two days trying to get Brainstorm and all its dependencies to interoperate properly in order to run it on the GPU, with the help of CUDA.

Btw, I just found that Caffe has a good tutorial: https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/wiki/Install-Caffe-on-EC2-from-scratch-%28Ubuntu,-CUDA-7,-cuDNN%29

flukeskywalker commented 8 years ago

I agree. We do need a detailed tutorial in the documentation. There is some work on this in the docs branch, and we'll improve it further.

Can you tell us more about what led to difficulties in installation? We don't want it to take 2 days for anyone.

iver56 commented 8 years ago

All attempts at trying to get CUDA 7.5 to work failed. Then I tried to install 7.0 using a the package manager method, but it ended up installing 7.5 anyway. I had to use the runfile method to install CUDA 7.0. I had problems with linux headers while trying to install CUDA 7.0 using the runfile. I had to delete and regenerate my /boot/grub/menu.lst. Also, I had to move my runfile to a different partition to get enough space for the CUDA installation, which seemingly requires about 4,5 GB of free space. Finally, nvidia's cuda installation instructions didn't make it clear where I should put the PATH variable for CUDA. Should it be in /etc/environment or ~/.bashrc? Or perhaps in .profile?
I had trouble with six. I had to upgrade it, but then I ended up having two installations, where the old version was owned by the OS, and pip would not remove it. That was a problem. I ended up removing it by hand, and that seemed to work.
I had to manually patch __init__.py in pytools. See https://bitbucket.org/gutworth/six/issues/107/import-intern-module-from-sixmoves and https://github.com/inducer/pycuda/issues/61
And then there were minor issues where I, for example, had to throw in an extra sudo apt-get update and prepend sudo to some commands, as indicated by the changes in this pull request

Kaixhin commented 8 years ago

FYI I've made CPU-only and CUDA Docker images to have preinstalled distributions of Brainstorm available for download. You can either copy the format from the Lasagne docs or ask me to do it once the docs branch is merged.

iver56 commented 8 years ago

Perfect! I would have used that if I knew about it :)

flukeskywalker commented 8 years ago

Thanks guys!

I'll merge this for now, and point to @Kaixhin's scripts in the docs soon.

Unfortunately, CUDA installation can (still!) be cumbersome but we can't really do much about that.

IDSIA / brainstorm

Update installation instructions #87