[Rd] Quick notes on R with F7

[Marc Schwartz]

Hi all,

Just a quick heads up that I made the plunge into F7 this week.

R version 2.5.0 Patched (2007-06-05 r41831) compiles and passes make
check-all.  F7 is using:

[marcs at Bellerophon ~]$ gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20070502 (Red Hat 4.1.2-12)


Some quick F7 notes:

1. Do a clean install rather than an 'in place' upgrade from FC6 or a
prior version. There are a lot of changes, not the least of which is the
consolidation of Extras and Core into a single release.

2. There will be some '.fc6' suffixed RPMS installed if there were no
changes from the FC6 versions. I have 91 of them, out of a total of 1545
installed RPMS.  Note that the F7 version RPM suffix is 'fc7', not
'f7' ...

3. There are some issues with SELinux and policies, so I have reverted
to running in 'Permissive' mode for the time being.

4. Do not use 'rhgb' (the Red Hat Graphical Boot) on the kernel boot
parameters in grub.conf. Especially if (like me) there are boot time
prompts (such as dmcrypt-LUKS passphrases) that need to be input during
boot. This interaction requires going from graphical to text mode and
back, presumably switching virtual terminals. This may be unique to
nVidia based video hardware, but there seems to be some issues with VT
switching, which also seems to cause problems for the 'Fast User
Switching' features new to F7. The symptoms include partially drawn
windows, incomplete logins and X freezes.

5. Emacs 22 has been released and is part of F7. From a quick look, it
would appear that the 'xft/anti-aliasing' font support available from
the CVS branch of 22 is not part of the formal stable release tree. Thus
I will continue to use the version 23 Unicode branch from CVS, along
with the latest ECB (cvs snap) and CEDET (1.0pre4 was just released
today) tool versions.

6. The rumors/intentions of TeXLive being part of F7 were premature and
teTeX is still in place. This is apparently due to the decision on the
part of the Fedora leadership folks that TeXLive is not yet ready for
prime time.


Other than that, things seem to be well, but I suspect that there will
be many updates coming in the first 30 days or so...the Fedora lists
have been quite busy...

HTH,

Marc Schwartz