Debdeep Bhattacharya

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Installing and using Cocalc notebook locally

30 Aug 2019

CoCalc is probably the best outcome of collaborative opn source efforts as of today. It is a collaborative online computing environment, mostly for Sage (an open source mathematical software). Apart from sage worksheets, it allows octave, jupyter notebooks, latex and R document editing, and many more. You can just create an account in their website and start using right away.

But the best part is that you can install Cocalc as a server and let others log in to it and collaborate. No need to install sage or sagemath.

Follow the instruction to install the cocalc-docker. It is just one line long code. It will download, extract and install. I had to use sudo to get it to work since I installed docker using sudo (sudo apt-get install docker.io). To open it in browser, make sure to use https://localhost instead of http://localhost.

I had create account (fake email ids are ok, since they are local)

To start and stop cocalc, use

sudo docker start cocalc

and

sudo docker stop cocalc

Usage:

u_th_x = var('u_th_x', latex_name = 'u_{\\theta}(x)'}

Later, do view(u_th_x) to see it rendered correctly as \(u_\theta(x)\).