Ubuntu – Linux distribution with ‘yum’ package manager

linuxrhelUbuntuyum

I am a professional statistician who uses the statistical programming language R. I'm currently building my own desktop computer and would like to run Linux as my operating system. Instead of base R, I'd like to use Revolution R Enterprise which lists Redhat Enterprise Linux as the required Linux distribution (more specifically, I was told by Revolution Analytic's technical support that "Since our installer requires the 'yum' package manager, Revolution R Enterprise for Linux is currently supported by Redhat Enterprise Linux").

I've run Ubuntu on my Mac OS X computer and liked Ubuntu. While Ubuntu does not use the 'yum' package manager, can I install Revolution R Enterprise on a computer with Ubuntu? If not, do I need to have Redhat Enterprise Linux or can I use another Linux distribution?

The archive file provided by Revolution has file format tar.gz.

From the installation manual:

2.1 System Requirements

Revolution R Enterprise for Red Hat Enterprise Linux has the following system requirements:
Processor 64-bit processor with x86-compatible architecture (variously known as AMD64, Intel
64, x86-64, IA-32e, EM64T, or x64 chips). Itanium-architecture chips (also known as
IA-64) are not supported. Multiple-core chips are recommended.
Operating System: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 or 5.5.
Memory: A minimum of 1GB of RAM is required; 4GB or more are recommended.
Disk Space: A minimum of 500MB of disk space are required.

2.2 Package Dependencies

Revolution R Enterprise, like most Linux applications, depends upon a number of Linux packages.
The first of these, listed in Table 2.1, require manual installation, and must be installed
before you run the automated script. While the list of dependencies may look daunting, it actually
involves installing just six packages: rpmlib, glibc, libICE, libgcc, libstdc++, unixODBC

Best Answer

In general, just using yum is not sufficient for package compatibility. The rpm package format is relatively flexible, in the sense that it doesn't impose much by way of policy. The R package you want to use could be packaged such that they're distribution agnostic and just need to be unpacked via yum. However, it is more likely that they follow a whole host of assumptions about the distribution beyond yum itself — what libraries are available, what they're named, where they put their files (and what rpm packages those things come from).

In that case, you'll be best off with Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, or with CentOS or Scientific Linux (both of which are built from the source packages provided by Red Hat). You may also be able to use Fedora, which is a community-built distribution in the same "family" (and generally much more desktop focused and bleeding edge).

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RHEL – How to Run New Software Without Updating GLIBC

You can definitely compile a new version of GLIBC and have it stored in a separate directory. The first thing you'll have to do is download the version of glibc that you want from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/glibc/.

Run the configure script and set the --prefix= to something like /home/you/mylibs.

After you've managed to install it into that directory, you'll have to set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the location of the new glibc.

You'll need to figure out any dependencies you may need to compile. You can create a shell script that sets the LD_* variables and the runs your program (which you'd have to do anyway), and run it repeatedly - download/recompiling missing libs along the way.

You could also use ldd to determine what shared libraries the program needs, then use ldd on each of the libraries to find out if they require glibc.

This can be a very time consuming process and is not for the impatient or faint of heart - traversing/recompiling your way through the possible dependencies required to make your application work may occasionally make you want to pull out your hair.

Update 1:

I downloaded glibc-2.4 and tried to compile it on CentOS 6. To get configure working properly I had to change the ac and ld version checks by changing:

2.1[3-9]*)

to:

2.*)

at lines 4045 and 4106 in the configure file itself. I set my *FLAGS environment variables like so:

LDFLAGS="-Wl,--sort-common -Wl,-zcombreloc -Wl,-znow" 
CFLAGS="-pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -g1 -O3 -frename-registers -fweb -ftracer -fmodulo-sched -fvariable-expansion-in-unroller -fgcse-sm"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}" 
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -freorder-blocks-and-partition" 
export LDFLAGS CFLAGS CXXFLAGS

and then executed ./configure --prefix=/home/tim/masochist. It configured properly... and it began building properly too... but then I started running into errors - mostly the compiler complaining about things being redefined.

At that point I gave up... Because it was becoming too time consuming. ;)

Bash – No package * available. cannot install git through yum

It seems that you didn't register with RHN, so you are unable to download from Redhat's base repo.

You can't get Redhat official packages without registering.

If you don't have RHN credentials, you can use the Centos base repo instead. See this link for more details.

Best Answer

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RHEL – How to Run New Software Without Updating GLIBC

Bash – No package * available. cannot install git through yum

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