> I thought this challenge warranted sharing with the entire BeagleBoard mailing list, since Matt is offering $1,000 and it sounds like a productive endeavor, especially now that the Bug Labs guys have full OpenJDK and SharkVM running on the ARM Cortex-A8, including the BeagleBoard and on Angstrom. Besides, I'd love to see more people introduce these Neuros-style bounties (and on more platforms, including MeeGo) sponsored by people interested in moving the state of technology forward, as long as it doesn't become the expected way to get anything done in the community. Hope someone picks this one up...
I hope this qualifies: http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/~koen/r_2.11.1-r0.5_armv7a.ipk :) I had to cheat a bit because my debian host has a broken fortran, so I compiled it natively on my xM and then packaged it using OE.
root@beagleboard-xM:~# uname -a
Linux beagleboard-xM 2.6.32 #2 PREEMPT Wed Jul 21 12:51:02 CEST 2010 armv7l GNU/Linux
root@beagleboard-xM:~# R
R version 2.11.1 (2010-05-31)
Copyright (C) 2010 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0
R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.
R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.
Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.
> x <- c(10.4, 5.6, 3.1, 6.4, 21.7)
> y <- c(x, 0, x)
> 1/x
[1] 0.09615385 0.17857143 0.32258065 0.15625000 0.04608295
>
regards,
Koen
> Sent to you by jkridner via Google Reader:
>
>
> Help port R to the BeagleBoard / Angstrom for $1,000
> via Antipasto Hardware Blog by Matt on 7/23/10
> Ok... I've been fooling around with the BeagleBoard for some time now, and I have a couple observations to make. First of all, it's crazy powerful. You can do a lot more than you'd expect, since the processor is so fast. I mean, seriously, it's faster than most Android handsets out there. So every app that could run on an Android phone can run on the BeagleBoard (in theory).
>
> The BeagleBoard has full Linux programming libraries, Makefile, gcc, perl, you name it, built in, and that makes programming a cinch in most cases. However.... some of my favorite applications on Linux are a little harder than others to port to the BeagleBoard. Including R, for instance. R is a statistical programming package that a lot of people use in the government and military and NSA to do advanced signal and data processing. I've been learning it in my spare time, and I think it would be really cool to have a portable version of it on a handheld.
>
> I tried to get it running on my BeagleBoard, but alas, I'm not much of a software guy (I'm much more hardware). I failed to get past some of the java lib dependencies, and don't know how to install those on Angstrom without totally recompiling everything. I was over at MIT this past week, just reading in the QA stacks library (I sneak in from time to time and just camp out there for hours with Chris), and we started talking about how whether it was doable. Chris bet me $500 that I could do it. Then I joked, well I'll bet $500 that I can't.
>
> $500 + $500 = $1,000
>
> I would pay $1,000 in real dollars (not gift certificates and useless things like that, I mean actual cash) to the first person who can demonstrate it running, and provide links to either a tar, or zip, or image, so I can get it up and running on my own too. The solution has to be open source, and publicly shareable.
>
>
> Personally, I think it's impossible. That's why I'm saying $1,000 and not like $200 or something like that. But even I'm somewhat realistic, so here's a list of "anti-conditions":
>
> • R has a lot of built in libraries that do graphing, visuals, etc. it doesn't need to do any of that stuff
> • Command line only is fine, no need for to port the GUI, I don't even know if that's possible
> • Obviously it should run whatever can be run within the memory limits of the BeagleBoard in RAM, and that will probably mean some of the base packages won't auto-load
> • It should at least have a basic R command line, and be able to instantiate arrays and user defined functions, etc.
>
> I don't really want to call this a "contest" because it's not, it's just a $1,000 check that I'll write if someone can help me port R to the BeagleBoard... if it's even possible.
>
>
>
>
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Besides, I'd love to see more people introduce these Neuros-style bounties (and on more platforms, including MeeGo) sponsored by people interested in moving the state of technology forward, as long as it doesn't become the expected way to get anything done in the community. Hope someone picks this one up...
I certainly have that fear as well--which is why I never want to make
it an official beagleboard.org thing, but I've seen it make some
short-term impact (potentially at the expense of long-term growth).
If it is out on the fringe and not getting overly tied to the way we
do things here, I can see it solving problems.
In this case, it seems R was already in a big distro (Debian) and that
putting it on Angstrom was just a matter of running the native build
tools. Hardly seems like something to get the community excited about
now, but I hope that Matt will better note the capability of both the
BeagleBoard and community.