Sage 4.5.2 on Virtualbox

[ancienthart]

I've managed to download and install sage 4.5.2 (i386) into an xubuntu
image on virtualbox. This has R with png, jpeg, tiff and cairo support
built in. I built this because it seems that the current vmware image
has been "pruned" a bit too aggressively, and can't connect to the
network from inside the image.

Would people be interested in this image? If so, where would I upload
it to?
This would be a "development" image, with all the libraries needed to
update to later Sage releases and rebuild R. Thus it would be a bit
bigger than strictly necessary. On the other hand, it would be much
easier for others to update (If for some reason I can't do it in the
future.)

A basic description of the method I used was:
Install xubuntu onto the virtualbox image. The default user account,
password and computer name are all set to sage, and automatic logging
in enabled.
Uninstall everything not required. (I have left some extra xorg
drivers installed, as X tends to die when I got too aggressive with
the pruning.) Basically there are only four original menu folders left
once I had finished.
Update all packages.
Install virtualbox guest additions.
Install build_essentials, the default jre and gfortran. Install png,
jpeg, tiff, tcl, tk, xorg development libraries.
Disable checking of updates.

Download sage-4.5.2-linux-32bit-ubuntu_10.04_lts-i686-Linux.tar.lzma
onto the image, and extract it into the /home/sage directory. Move all
files from the created directory into /home/sage.
Delete the now empty directory and the archive.

Start ./sage and wait until all the first configuration messages
finish.
Inside sage, run install_package('r-2.10.1.p2', force=True)

Finally, I set some profile files to add /home/sage to the PATH
variable, created some extra menu entries and desktop icons.

Finally, I exported the image and zipped it all up.

Joal Heagney

[kcrisman]

I think I get what happened with the VMWare image... it's that R only
wants to build with graphics support when certain development
libraries are there, and the Ubuntu on it didn't have them, unlike
most ones people have. That is SO annoying - why does R need them to
get graphics support? I have not gotten answers on this on the R list
- can you point us to a place where the reason for this (and/or how to
get around it) is documented?

I think that the most useful thing would be to do the same thing with
VMWare, since apparently that has been easier to use for some, but who
knows?

Incidentally, you could quit Sage and do

./sage -f r

and it would do the usual package without having to specify the
version number, I think (I know this proved to be annoying for you
before).

Thanks for your work!

- kcrisman

[David Joyner]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 5:50 AM, ancienthart <joalh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've managed to download and install sage 4.5.2 (i386) into an xubuntu
> image on virtualbox. This has R with png, jpeg, tiff and cairo support
> built in. I built this because it seems that the current vmware image
> has been "pruned" a bit too aggressively, and can't connect to the
> network from inside the image.
>
> Would people be interested in this image? If so, where would I upload
> it to?

Although I'm not a windows user, I would imagine this would be
interesting to some.

...

>
> Joal Heagney
>
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[ancienthart]

Drat, I forgot all about that commandline option. :/ Thanks kcrisman,
I'll use that in the future.
As for installing on vmware, don't you need the commercial version to
be able to export images? (Part of the reason I did this on
virtualbox)

Joal Heagney