Installing nest on Windows or WSL

[appukuttan-shailesh]

We are currently in the process of preparing a tutorial for setting up PyNN and various simulators in various environments (Linux, Mac OS, Windows, EBRAINS Jupyterlab). The tutorial is intended for beginner to intermediate users, and thereore we wish to avoid more involved installation techniques. With this in mind:

1. Is it possible to currently install nest on Windows 10? If yes, are there any docs or instructions to follow? A related ticket I found was this, but that link is no longer accessible (also potentially outdated now?).

2. Is using the Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) an option worth considering? Are there are known issues/limitations to this approach? Would it be as simple as doing sudo apt-get install nest or similar?

Using a VirtualBox with Linux OS is a possible approach (and we already have such a tutorial created for Ubuntu), but was curious if there is any way of achieving this on Windows itself. Thanks.

[clinssen]

Hi, this is not about NEST Simulator proper, but we had some success getting ODE-toolbox and its dependency PyGSL up and running on WSL last year. This was fairly painless and might be your best bet. Please let us know how you get on.

[appukuttan-shailesh]

I was able to install and test basic usage of nest on WSL. Thanks @clinssen for the encouragemet to explore this option. I shall post a link to the tutorial here on this post once it is officially published, as it might be of use to other users in future.

I still haven't found a way to install nest directly on Windows itself (without WSL, VMware or VirtualBox). For that version of the tutorial I intend to exclude nest, unless someone can provide tips on how to do this.

[terhorstd]

For a native install on windows we currently do not have the developer capacity, since most developers work under Linux and can't provide windows support. Currently the WSL install seems to be mostly painless for many, but any help with that (support, documentation, …) would be appreciated.

[github-actions[bot]]

Issue automatically marked stale!

[JanVogelsang]

I was not able to install Nest from source using WSL a couple of weeks ago. I can't remember the exact issue, but I know that I tried resolving the issue for quite some time and could not manage to get it running. If necessary I can see if I can provide more details about the issue after reactivating my Windows machine.

[github-actions[bot]]

Issue automatically marked stale!

[heplesser]

Closing as we do not support Windows at present.

[Sobhan-Nili]

It is appreciated if you could remove the windows logo on the installation page as it is false claim and misleading. Providing WSL support isn't the same as running on windows.