[Rd] Rmpi on Fedora 8

[Prof Brian Ripley]

A yum update to lam 7.1.4 (from 7.1.2) broke Rmpi for me this last week 
and quite a few changes were needed to repair this, so I'm reporting here 
in case it helps others.  This was an x86_64 system - adjust 'lib64' 
suitably for 32-bit systems.

There seems to me to be major organizational changes for a 'patchlevel' 
update to a setup that previously worked out of the box.  They almost 
certainly apply to Fedora 9 too.

- yum left some lam 7.1.2 RPMs behind, and I have been unable to remove
   them via yum.  This causes some confusion.

- The lam libs are in /usr/lib64/lam/lib, and ldconfig needs to be told
   about this, so

   cat > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/lam.ld.conf
   /usr/lib64/lam/lib
   ^D
   /sbin/ldconfig

   (AFAIR, the previous version was in /usr/lib64/lam, and installed a
   ld.so.conf.d file.  Make sure /usr/lib64/lam is not in the ldconfig
   path.)

- At this point Rmpi may load and then immediately terminate R as the lam
   helpfile is not found (which is not nice of the lam libs).  You may need to
   export LAMHOME=/usr/lib64/lam .  Even if the helpfile is found, it still
   terminates R if lamd is not running.  (As I recall previous RPM
   installations had run lamboot at system boot.)

- The final step is to start a lam configuration.  I was only able to do
   this by setting -prefix, e.g.

    /usr/lib64/lam/bin/lamboot -prefix /usr/lib64/lam

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595