Installing from source on WSL on Windows

These instructions are for getting a development environment, or perhaps for hosting a Plom Server on Windows. If you only want to grade some papers, then you don’t need all this; instead go to plomgrading.org and follow instructions for getting started with a Plom Client.

Plom has been developed primarily on Unix systems: here we discuss how it can be used on Microsoft Windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Getting WSL

Go to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install for detailed information.

Installing Plom dependencies

These instructions assume you are running Ubuntu 22.04 on WSL, and were last tested in March 2023.

1. First install some dependencies from the package manager

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install \
           cmake make g++ dvipng \
           python3-passlib python3-pandas python3-pytest \
           python3-pyqt6 python3-pyqt6.qtsvg pyqt6-dev-tools \
           python3-dev python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-wheel \
           python3-requests-toolbelt texlive-latex-extra \
           latexmk texlive-fonts-recommended python3-pillow
   

   (These may be out of date: compare to the instructions for Ubuntu elsewhere).

2. python3 -m pip install --upgrade --user pip

3. pip install --user plom (or pip install --user . from inside the Plom source tree) should pull in the remaining dependencies.

4. Like regular Ubuntu, this seems to lack ~/.local/bin in the path so you may not be able to run plom-client.

   • You can try ~/.local/bin/plom-client to see if things are working without messing around with such config files.

   • You can use python3 -m plomclient.client instead.

   • Or you can modify the PATH environment variable in a bash startup file… something like adding export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin to the file .bash_profile, (You might need to create that file, e.g., with nano .bash_profile.)