My presentation introduces and briefly discusses fifteen different ways to 'use R' in Quantian. Roughly bucketed into four categories (classic, graphical, web-based and programmatically), these approaches cover the spectrum from the well-known to newer and promising interfaces. And of course all run 'as is' directly off a self-configuring and directly bootable Quantian dvd or iso image.
Once again, thanks to the organizers in Vienna who mounted yet another conference that was both fun, informative and packed with excellent talks. It also drew even more R users and developers than before -- almost twice the number of participants and presentations than in 2004. It looks like we will meet next year in Boston for a North American UseR!, followed by Munich in 2008.
The HOWTO shows how to create a virtual disk using the
qemu-img command from
qemu, how to add such a disk
image to simple the VMWare Player configuration file, and howto install into
that disk, and later boot from it, inside a VMWare Player session.
All of this should actually work for just about any bootable iso with an installer, not just those that are based on Knoppix. Feedback welcome!
This release is the second one based on Knoppix 4.0.2 and features:
Downloads are available via the Quantian site at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and at from Greg Warnes' machine at Yale. European mirrors should be in sync within a day or two, Bittorrent support via the Linux Mirror Project should also be available soon. Note that http transfers seem to be problematic due to the file size of over 2gb; rsync and bittorrent are probably a better approach.
More information is as always available at the Quantian pages.
Over the last few days, I have experimented a little more, perused the VMware Player Forum and googled a bit. It turns out that you can employ the 'free as in speech' virtualization tool qemu (using version 0.7.2 from Debian unstable is fine, looks like a newer 0.8.0 it out upstream) to create a virtual disk image in vmdk format suitable for VMware. For example, the command
qemu-img create -f vmdk Quantian.vmdk 512Mcreates a 512mb file of the given name in the in required vmdb format. By the way, qemu is smart and creates a much smaller file -- an 'empty' 512mb partition occupies only 12mb.
It is then only a matter of updating the previously posted Quantian.vmx file to add the 'new disk'. I.e. instead of defining just one ide device, we now use two as per
# CDROM InfoOn the next reboot, Quantian will display a disk symbol for hdc. It it then a matter of starting a root shell in Quantian, running cfdisk or fdisk to partition the new "empty" disk drive and to add a /dev/hdc1 partition (or more), running
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.fileName = "quantian_0.7.9.1.iso"
ide0:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
# edd 31 Dec 2005 adding a virtual disk file
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.filename = "Quantian.vmdk"
ide1:0.redo = ""
ide1:0.deviceType = "ata-hardDisk"
mke2fs -j dev/hdc1 to add a filesystem --- and on
a subsequent reboot, the disk is ready for use.
It should thus be possible to create a suitable disk file of, say, ten or so
gigabytes (given that Quantian expands to around seven gigs), create a
filesystem and then run knx2hd to install Quantian onto the new
virtual disk, make the disk bootable and, presto!, have a virtual instance of
Quantian on stateful read/write media. While my tests have been limited to
using a Linux host, this procedure should work just the same way in Windows.
Oh, and as it's still early afternoon here: Best wishes for 2006 to everyone!
And indeed, lo and behold, it works. Quite well, actually. Hhere is what I did:
vmware-install.pl
All defaults were sane on my Kubuntu desktop, no complaints.
I then tried to be cute and started two Quantian instances (which can be done if you copy the .vmx file to a new file), started both in kernel 2.4 and tried openMosix, It didn't start immediately, presumably because the test for /proc/hpc got tricked by the /proc filesystem of the non-openMosix host. A quick 'mkdir mfs; /etc/init.d/openmosix start' later, things started to roll. However, while the two machines 'saw' each other, no actual job sharing seemed to occur. They also did not 'see' the laptop running outside the hosted VMware setting even though all machines were on the same 192.168.1. subnet. Maybe a simple configuration issue, maybe not.
All in all, a pleasant surprise that I was able to set all this up in a couple of minutes.
Update: Fixed URL for the Quantian.vmx file.
This release is the first one based on Knoppix 4.0.2 and features:
Downloads are available from the Quantian site at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and at from Greg Warnes' machine at Yale. European mirrors should be in sync within a day or two, Bittorrent support via the Linux Mirror Project should also be available soon. Note that http transfers seem to be problematic due to the file size of over 2gb; rsync and bittorrent are probably a better approach.
More information is as always available at the Quantian pages.
My thanks to Robert Gentleman, Seth Falcon and Dirk Petersen for their help in getting the new mirror set up.
Update: This has now been corrected, the price at LinuxCentral.com is $9.95 for the DVD.
As shown by this screenshot, opus had transferred a whopping 6.4 TB in total, including 5.0 TB in over 2600 downloads of the most recent release 0.6.9.3.
So please join me in a big 'Thanks' to Tony, Eric and the U W for supplying this service. It is greatly appreciated.
Lastly, if anybody knows of a willing and able host that could play primary or secondary mirror for Quantian as well as torrent seeder, please do not hesitate to contact me.
CHAOS is a very small 6 mb iso distribution ideally suited for booting nodes in an openMosix cluster. Moreover, CHAOS is generally plug-in compatible with clusterKnoppix, and thus with Quantian allowing for a very powerful combination of, say, a Quantian-booted cluster head node (serving its six gigabytes of software) that can be set up with a large number of ad-hoc CHAOS (new site) drones booted of their compact six megabytes distribution.
This release is the third one based on Knoppix 3.6 and brings a couple of updates:
More information is as always available at the Quantian pages.
Nice to know that the long-meant-to-be-retired box acting as the static webserver took it all in a breeze,
Otherwise, the bittorrent tracker page at U of Washington rocks: 40 completed transfer in the few days since the announcements, compared to 89 for last month's 0.6.9.1, or the whopping 288 downloads of 0.5.9.4 which sum up to almost half a terabyte. Gotta fill the fiber ...
This release is the second one based on Knoppix 3.6 and brings numerous updates:
More information in the Quantian changelog once I get a chance to update it, and general info is as always at the Quantian pages.
Two days ago, Cheapbytes sales informed me that they have 0.6.9.1 available as well.
I should note that I haven't been able to boot my laptops from USB, but that may well be a limitation in these not-exactly-brandnew laptops rather than in the method per se.
This is a maintenance and bug-fix release over 0.5.9.3, yet still contains a rather large number of changes:
Slightly more informations are in the Quantian changelog, and general info is as always at the Quantian pages.
While nominally only a maintenance upgrade over 0.5.9.2, it still contains a rather large number of changes:
Slightly more informations are in the Quantian changelog, and general info is as always at the Quantian pages.
It was a hectic trip: arrived late yesterday and caught a little bit of a BoF session before working some more on the slides til the early morning (ahem). Got up, registered, listened to Eric Allman of Sendmail fame on Spam, then to Martin on Debian and MIA -- while I worked on the slides (ahem). Then left the conference and met some Bostonian friends for lunch, back to the conference, listened to some other 'Extreme Linux' presentations, gave my talk and rushed back to Chicago. I should have allowed for more time because what I managed to see was all good. Also odd to know that there were other Debianers and not having met any...
This is a maintenance upgrade over 0.5.9.1, but still contains a rather large number of changes:
Slightly more informations are in the Quantian changelog, and general info is as always at the Quantian pages.
The Cheapbytes.com page also lists Mfg. Price $19.99. Being the 'manufacturer' here, I don't think I ever said anything about prices. Let alone offered to sell any. Oh well.
So burning dvds is a good idea, as is running directly from a linux partition
as outlined in the lilo booting
HOWTO. That said, there are of course always a few machines which simply
cannot be turned into dual-boot or linux-only. For these, we have a very
nice new solution: just drop the iso image onto c:/ as, say,
quantian.iso, and then all one needs is a boot cdrom (such as
the current clusterKnoppix cdrom
from which Quantian is derived), and then use
knoppix bootfrom=/dev/hda1/quantian.isoat the prompt.
Clean, simple, easy. Doesn't cause heatburn or pimples, and worked on my trusted Thinkpad T23, a machine from work which knows only win2k. The full writeup is now up in the new windows booting HOWTO.
Work on 0.5.9.* should hopefully commence in the next few days, based on Wim's recent clusterKnoppix releases derived from the new Knoppix 3.4.
As always, more info at the Quantian pages.
0.4.9.6 is a bug fix release with relatively few changes compared to 0.4.9.5, but has
As always, more info at the Quantian pages.
With Cebit coming next week, I'd suspect that the next Quantian release will be based on the Knoppix 3.4 that is to be released there -- but it may take a while until all clusterKnoppix and Quantian flow through.
As always, more info at the Quantian pages.
Now based on kernel 2.4.24 (while the openMosix patch is being finalised for 2.4.25), this is still Knoppix 3.3 based. A new version based on Knoppix 3.4 will appear some time after CeBIT. As always, more info at the Quantian pages.
Someone should tell them to upgrade to 0.4.9.1, though.
I also added a bunch more R-related packages. A more detailed announcement should go out tonight, probably via freshmeat.
Details as always at the Quantian site.
/usr/src/linux/lib/inflate.c: In function inflate_codes': /usr/src/linux/lib/inflate.c:531: error: outcnt' undeclared (first use in this function)until I found this quote from Klaus in my debian-knoppix folder:
> Please double check that "PPP" (Network device section) and "Deflate > compression" (subitem of PPP) is marked as "Yes", otherwise cloop won't > compile/run. I'm trying to fix this in a later release.That does the trick.
They are also available via rsync, try rsync
www.analytics.washington.edu::quantian for the directory listing, and
e.g. rsync www.analytics.washington.edu::quantian/README.txt .
for the README file.
Thanks as always to Tony Rossini for the hosting space on his workstation.
