Revolution R on CentOS 6

One of the most interesting talks I attended at Hadoop World was by Revolution Analytics.  A couple of months ago they released a set of open-source packages to Github which marries their ‘R’ statistical programming language to the power of Hadoop.  As well as running R programs across Map/Reduce it includes support to work with datasets stored in HDFS and HBase.

Today I had the pleasure of installing it on our ‘petunia’ cluster.  I grabbed the ‘Revolution R Community‘ edition from the website and set about installing it.  They provide a RHEL-friendly download, I’m on CentOS 6 so I didn’t foresee any big issues.

The good news is that CentOS 6 has most of the dependencies needed, to be exact the following were all fine:

bzip2-devel-1.0.5-7.el6_0.x86_64
cairo-devel-1.8.8-3.1.el6.x86_64
cloog-ppl-0.15.7-1.2.el6.x86_64
compat-libgfortran-41-4.1.2-39.el6.x86_64
compat-readline5-5.2-17.1.el6.x86_64
cpp-4.4.4-13.el6.x86_64
fontconfig-devel-2.8.0-3.el6.x86_64
freetype-devel-2.3.11-6.el6_0.2.x86_64
gcc-4.4.4-13.el6.x86_64
gcc-c++-4.4.4-13.el6.x86_64
gcc-gfortran-4.4.4-13.el6.x86_64
gcc-objc-4.4.4-13.el6.x86_64
glibc-devel-2.12-1.7.el6_0.5.x86_64
glibc-headers-2.12-1.7.el6_0.5.x86_64
kernel-headers-2.6.32-71.29.1.el6.x86_64
libgfortran-4.4.4-13.el6.x86_64
libICE-1.0.6-1.el6.x86_64
libICE-devel-1.0.6-1.el6.x86_64
libjpeg-6b-46.el6.x86_64
libjpeg-devel-6b-46.el6.x86_64
libobjc-4.4.4-13.el6.x86_64
libpng-devel-1.2.44-1.el6.x86_64
libSM-1.1.0-7.1.el6.x86_64
libSM-devel-1.1.0-7.1.el6.x86_64
libstdc++-devel-4.4.4-13.el6.x86_64
libtiff-3.9.4-1.el6_0.3.x86_64
libtiff-devel-3.9.4-1.el6_0.3.x86_64
libX11-devel-1.3-2.el6.x86_64
libXau-devel-1.0.5-1.el6.x86_64
libxcb-devel-1.5-1.el6.x86_64
libXdmcp-1.0.3-1.el6.x86_64
libXdmcp-devel-1.0.3-1.el6.x86_64
libXext-1.1-3.el6.x86_64
libXext-devel-1.1-3.el6.x86_64
libXmu-1.0.5-1.el6.x86_64
libXmu-devel-1.0.5-1.el6.x86_64
libXrender-devel-0.9.5-1.el6.x86_64
libXt-1.0.7-1.el6.x86_64
libXt-devel-1.0.7-1.el6.x86_64
mpfr-2.4.1-6.el6.x86_64
ncurses-devel-5.7-3.20090208.el6.x86_64
pixman-devel-0.18.4-1.el6_0.1.x86_64
pkgconfig-0.23-9.1.el6.x86_64
ppl-0.10.2-11.el6.x86_64
python-devel-2.6.5-3.el6_0.2.x86_64
readline-devel-6.0-3.el6.x86_64
xorg-x11-proto-devel-7.4-35.el6.noarch
zlib-devel-1.2.3-25.el6.x86_64

However all was not well, the libraries ‘tcl‘, ‘tk‘ & ‘libicu‘ weren’t happy.  The latest versions available from CentOS 6 were just too revolutionary and the installer stopped dead in its tracks.

Solution

1. Firstly remove the current (CentOS 6) versions:

$ sudo yum erase tcl tcl-devel tk tk-devel libicu libicu-devel

2. Prevent yum from updating them by editing /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and adding the line to both the [base] and [updates] sections of the file:

exclude=libicu libicu-devel tcl tcl-devel tk tk-devel

3. Download the RPM’s for those packages direct from your nearest CentOS 5 mirror.

4. Install these RPM’s manually…

5. Re-run the installer, and all should be well!


Comments

2 responses to “Revolution R on CentOS 6”

  1. mike avatar

    Thanks for posting this information. I had the same error, but after removing those packages I am unable to install the same using rpm command. I have tried at least five or more times but failed every time. Could you please let us know the direct link for those rpm packages which worked for you?

    Thanks again for helping people like me.

  2. Nagendra Kumar avatar
    Nagendra Kumar

    1. Download R-devel.tar from ftp://ftp.stat.math.ethz.ch/pub/Software/R/ 2. Unzip tar.gz 3. Follow the steps on http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html#Installationmake, insall $ whereis RR: /usr/bin/R /usr/lib64/R /usr/local/bin/R /usr/share/R /usr/share/man/man1/R.1.gz 4. Install RStudio Serverhttp://www.rstudio.com/ide/download/server

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