Using Revolution R 4.2 in Ubuntu 10.10

This is a quick note for those who want to use Revolution Analytics's Enterprise R 4.2 in Ubuntu 10.10

Of course, the first thing you have to do is getting a copy of the software, you can purchase it by contacting Revolution Analytics or download the version for academic.

The biggest issue is that Enterprise R 4.2 only supports RHEL 5.5 or earlier. I have confirmed that the "aliened" rpms do not work in Ubuntu or Debian  (you can't find the executables, only the libraries),  thus.  An instance of working installed RHEL is required.

Installing RHEL (or, CentOS) is not a big deal, the big deal is that you have to use the old version software without "optimized usability" shipped with RHEL, I think that definitely a nightmare for spoiled Ubuntu users.

Thank KVM, we can reach the point we want: we can use the Ubuntu as the host and CentOS as the guest OS running on the virtual machine and commute them via ssh.

The following steps are what I done to make Enterprise R 4.2 works for me:

0. Download CentOS 5.5 installation CD image and Enterprise R's tar package

1. In host Ubuntu:
      sudo apt-get install libvirt-bin qemu-kvm

      sudo service qemu-kvm start

      sudo service libvirt-bin start 

 2. From main menu, choose  "System Tools-> Virtual Machine Manager" and add a new virtual machine using the CentOS image as the virtual cdrom, then install the CentOS in the virtual machine. I suggest that do not install the desktop environment.

 3. In the installed guest CentOS, run the command "/sbin/ifconfig" to see the IP address of the guest CentOS, then use sftp to "upload" the Enterprise R tar package to the guest OS

 4. In guest OS, run yum install unixODBC  then untar the tar package, then cd to the uncompressed Revo folder and execute  ./install.py  

  

 5. Now you can use the Enterprise R 4.2 in Ubuntu, with CentOS as the guest OS.

     ESS can help you process the output of the R process running on the guest OS.

 There are several things we need to keep in mind:

 A. There are some performance penalty on the guest OS

 B. You need to upload (or tell R the accessible path) the data files to the guest OS

 C. You can not use other virtual machines (like virtualbox) at the same time

 D. Enterprise R for RHEL does not provide the fancy IDE available on Win32(or Win64)