[R-sig-Debian] Installing R on Ubuntu8.04; episode 3184

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 16 May 2009 at 15:57, Judson wrote:
| Thanks to everyone who has responded (esp. Michael, I greatly
| appreciate but also recognize that getting R on my machine is not your
| career).  Your last response was (basically) uninstall, reboot, retry
| Synaptic, if no good try:
| 
| judson at judson:~$ sudo wget
| http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/hardy/r-base-core_2.9.0-2hardy0_i386.deb
| 
| I GOT
| 
| --15:03:02--  http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/hardy/r-base-core_2.9.0-2hardy0_i386.deb
|            => `r-base-core_2.9.0-2hardy0_i386.deb.1'
| Resolving cran.r-project.org... 137.208.57.37
| Connecting to cran.r-project.org|137.208.57.37|:80... connected.
| HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
| Length: 10,742,580 (10M) [application/x-debian-package]
| 
| 100%[====================================>] 10,742,580   237.44K/s    ETA 00:00
| 
| 15:04:12 (149.96 KB/s) - `r-base-core_2.9.0-2hardy0_i386.deb.1' saved
| [10742580/10742580]
| 
| I FOLLOWED
| 
| judson at judson:~$ sudo dpkg -i r-base-core_2.9.0-2hardy0_i386.deb
| 
| I GOT
| 
| dpkg: error processing r-base-core_2.9.0-2hardy0_i386.deb (--install):
|  package architecture (i386) does not match system (lpia)
| 
| How is this?  I'm way underprepared here but it's a Dell Inspiron Mini
| 9", Intel Atom ~1.7 ghz
| 
| This message is hiding something else.  The Atom is in the i386
| lineage as surely as Mine That Bird comes down from Seattle Slew, no?

Ohhhhh I once knew that and promptly forgot.  This is the same, apparently,
for some of the Eee PC netbooks, and possibly other netbooks.

Because your hardware has the magic powersaving functions, "they" decided to
call it a different hardware platform even though it really is a i386
(coupled with the cpu frequency scaling or whatever magic they do).

What that means is that ... (wait for it) ... your apt et al (synaptic,
aptitude, ...) now think you cannot use automatic upgrades.

You did the right thing and you are almost there. You need one more switch
argument to 'sudo dpkg -i r-base-core*deb' to override the apparent hardware
mismatch between lpia and i386.

I think, looking at 'dpkg --force-help', that you want 

  sudo dpkg --force-architecture --install r-base-core_2.9.0-2hardy0_i386.deb

Try that, and google around the Debian / Ubuntu netbook help sites, wiki,
forums, ... to see how you can override that for good so that the 'lpia vs
i386' issue won't kill you.

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.