Update installation guide to work better for windows, and also simplify setup in general

[michael-vedeler]

Intro

So the issue i have had is that i got a new laptop recently, and had to set it up from scratch - and since i only have community edition of visual studio, i simply only have the newest version available (today that is 17.11.x, which is not compatible with cuda 11.8).

I have tried, i think, every single possible way to install nerfstudio on my computer - trying to do the unofficial upgrade of the cuda toolkit to 12.4 and install a newer version of torch and so on, but that did only lead to more headaches. I have tried to install an earlier version of visual studio build tools (17.8, that is compatible with cuda 11.8), that almost worked, but crashed when running ns-train with g-splat.

So to sum it up - i spent an embarrassingly long time yesterday to try to install nerfstudio on my new laptop..

The solution
So when i woke up today, i remembered that it is possible to install WSL to run linux on windows computers - and guess if it worked? It worked almost out of the box.

WSL is also especially nice, since you dont need to open a virtual machine or anything, it simply runs as its own command prompt on windows - just also being able to run linux code!

I had to do some small tweaks, first of which, was to ensure miniconda was installed in the linux environment:

wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh bash Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh
Activate it:
source ~/.bashrc

Set the g++ version to 11:

sudo apt update sudo apt install gcc-11 g++-11 sudo apt install -y build-essential

I also made sure that i set GCC-11 as the Default for the Installation Process (not sure if this is strictly necessary):

export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-11 export CXX=/usr/bin/g++-11

I also had to make sure the cuda toolkit was installed correctly in WSL:

sudo apt update sudo apt install nvidia-cuda-toolkit

When ensuring all of the previous steps are done, you simply can run the installation guide for linux, and it worked (for me at least)

I really hope this helps anyone experiencing issues installing nerfstudio on newer windows pcs, and maybe hopefully ends up in the actual guide for installing nerfstudio! :D Let's make it easier for everyone to use these amazing tools!

Also a side note; if anyone with better software knowledge then me read through this, the order of things here might be a bit of (thats because i fixed issues as they came when trying to install nerfstudio..).

[michael-vedeler]

WSL install guide here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

[thomaspingel]

Nice. I tried to do this last year on WSL and got nowhere. I did need to set GCC-11 as the default for it to work.