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Quick notes on R with F7

5 messages · Marc Schwartz, Brian Ripley, Gavin Simpson +1 more

#
Hi all,

Just a quick heads up that I made the plunge into F7 this week.

R version 2.5.0 Patched (2007-06-05 r41831) compiles and passes make
check-all.  F7 is using:

[marcs at Bellerophon ~]$ gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20070502 (Red Hat 4.1.2-12)


Some quick F7 notes:

1. Do a clean install rather than an 'in place' upgrade from FC6 or a
prior version. There are a lot of changes, not the least of which is the
consolidation of Extras and Core into a single release.

2. There will be some '.fc6' suffixed RPMS installed if there were no
changes from the FC6 versions. I have 91 of them, out of a total of 1545
installed RPMS.  Note that the F7 version RPM suffix is 'fc7', not
'f7' ...

3. There are some issues with SELinux and policies, so I have reverted
to running in 'Permissive' mode for the time being.

4. Do not use 'rhgb' (the Red Hat Graphical Boot) on the kernel boot
parameters in grub.conf. Especially if (like me) there are boot time
prompts (such as dmcrypt-LUKS passphrases) that need to be input during
boot. This interaction requires going from graphical to text mode and
back, presumably switching virtual terminals. This may be unique to
nVidia based video hardware, but there seems to be some issues with VT
switching, which also seems to cause problems for the 'Fast User
Switching' features new to F7. The symptoms include partially drawn
windows, incomplete logins and X freezes.

5. Emacs 22 has been released and is part of F7. From a quick look, it
would appear that the 'xft/anti-aliasing' font support available from
the CVS branch of 22 is not part of the formal stable release tree. Thus
I will continue to use the version 23 Unicode branch from CVS, along
with the latest ECB (cvs snap) and CEDET (1.0pre4 was just released
today) tool versions.

6. The rumors/intentions of TeXLive being part of F7 were premature and
teTeX is still in place. This is apparently due to the decision on the
part of the Fedora leadership folks that TeXLive is not yet ready for
prime time.


Other than that, things seem to be well, but I suspect that there will
be many updates coming in the first 30 days or so...the Fedora lists
have been quite busy...

HTH,

Marc Schwartz
#
Marc,

Thanks for the report.  We had noted the release date for F7 as one of the 
milestones to take account of in scheduling 2.5.1, and thought we might 
just know an early adopter.  Unfortunately the other milestone (the 
release of gcc 4.2.0 for MinGW has not happened on the promised date, June 
1, AFAICS).

[Before anyone asks, 2.5.1 is not yet scheduled.]

Brian
On Wed, 6 Jun 2007, Marc Schwartz wrote:

            

  
    
#
On Wed, 2007-06-06 at 17:58 +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
In case it is of any additional use, over and above Marc's post, I
installed F7 on my laptop at the weekend, and built R2.5.0-patched
(version as of sometime on Saturday afternoon - sorry my laptop is at
home and I'm still at work). Passed make check-all for me as well. All
seems to be well with R and F7 thus far.

G
#
FWIW, I did an in-place upgrade via Yum
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq) and it is viable -
in fact I did the upgrade+reboot remotely; R and mingw-cross both
seem to survive the upgrade.
$ rpm -qa |wc -l
2050
$ rpm -qa |grep 'fc6' |wc -l
149
$ rpm -qa |grep 'fc7' |wc -l
1295

Before upgrade I had 1984 rpm's.

One strangeness I noticed about emacs is that it stays at the splash 
screen and doesn't display the specified file to be edited until control-L.

HTL
Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
#
I did that from 5 to 6, using the DVD ISO file (mounted as a loopback
device) as a local yum repo. 

It worked quickly, since it was HD to HD. It was hairy however and as
noted in the FAQ, left things to be cleaned up after the upgrade.  I was
less comfortable doing it again from 6 to 7.  Figured that I was
tempting fate...

BTW, on the use of grep below, you don't need to pipe the output to
'wc'. You can use:

[marcs at Bellerophon ~]$ rpm -qa | grep . -c
1546
[marcs at Bellerophon ~]$ rpm -qa | grep fc6 -c
91
[marcs at Bellerophon ~]$ rpm -qa | grep fc7 -c
1115


Also on emacs:

1. If you click on the splash screen with a mouse, it will also clear.
It seems to also eventually clear on it's own after a bit (~30 seconds),
at least in 23.

2. You can append '--no-splash' to the emacs command line to disable it.
See 'emacs --help'.


...And in case anyone is wondering (because somebody asked), yes my
system name is a reference to my all-time favorite 1956 SciFi movie,
"Forbidden Planet"...  :-)

Regards,

Marc
On Wed, 2007-06-06 at 21:09 +0100, Hin-Tak Leung wrote: