Sage Live - 511 -53

For talk and support relating specifically to Puppy derivatives
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emil
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#61 Post by emil »

Hi hayden,

thanks for feedback - I am glad you find it useful and I share your opinion about the "loosing steam" problem of many projects. Every project has its specific strengths and weaknesses - I summed up why I think Sage is promising and worth the time invested:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=63810

About micro emacs:
yep this is a bug with mg: it can be fixed with change the file
/usr/share/applications/mg-p.desktop, exec mg should be

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exec xterm -e mg
After that you have to use Menu>Refresh desktop (fixmenus).
I try to fix this in the next release (maybe Februar)

I included the small micro emacs, because it has the basic emacs feeling without the size. And I put an "emacs" symlink in /usr/bin to mg for those firsttimers who get lost at the commandline and need an emacs like editor.

which emacs?

Which emacs package did you use? I just tried the package which I offer on the SageliveCD homepage for download.
http://boxen.math.washington.edu/home/e ... emacs.html
it worked flawless, including menu entry and the symlink to mg was overwritten. I currently work in my small server version of Sage Live, but it should be the same for 511-47.

terminal infernal
You are probably right that an advanced terminal would be better. However for just changing colors there is the option to call urxvt with the -bg and fg parameters (e.g. right click on Console icon on desktop, edit item, Arguments to pass -bg black -fg white.), Maybe a good solution would be to offer an additional terminal as extra package for download - what do you think?

Open Sci distros
I had a look on Quantian and Poseidon Linux.
Both are valuable projects, although the last Quantian release is from 2006.

I think specific advantages of puppy is that it is small and easy to install on a wide variety of platforms. In combination with Sage it offers a comprehensive system with a unified interface AND: it may act as a server, so the whole power is accessible over the net to others.

Let me stress that I am very happy about any contributions and feedback. In fact I feel that documentation and published applications are more important than compiling over and over.
If you have any documentation or examples just post them :D . It is also possible to publish Sage notebooks on one of the public servers, so we could just insert links here. e.g. Published Worksheets on main Sage Server of University of Washington
Some Examples from Sage dev Jason Grout from Drake Univ.
A German Sage server

cheers 8)
emil

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hayden
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Emacs in Sage Live etc.

#62 Post by hayden »

Hi Emil, thanks for your detailed response. I agree that Emacs should not be the default text editor due to its size and the fact that many people do not belong to The Church of Emacs. I do not remember now where I downloaded Emacs from but Sage Live and all the other things I installed were either downloaded at the same time or installed from within Sage Live. I will try the link you provided.

By way of documentation, here

http://courses.statistics.com/software/R/Rhome.htm

is some very detailed documentation of R for beginners. This was created for my online courses at statistics.com. They provided some financial support and host it in return for making it available to anyone. I don't know of any other documentation that is not for statisticians or programmers.

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hayden
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Emacs in Sage Live

#63 Post by hayden »

Ah, it's coming back to me. The link you provided above for Emacs actually gets me gnuplot. That must be why I looked elsewhere. Your link cliams to offer version 23.2 and I found 23.3 elsewhere. Do you have a working link to 23.2?

emil
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#64 Post by emil »

Well, my Homepage is buggy - here is the right link
http://boxen.math.washington.edu/home/e ... 2-i486.pet

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hayden
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Save Life testing

#65 Post by hayden »

Thanks. That Emacs seems to work.

LyX runs but complains that it can't produce output because the article style is missing. Sounds like a broken link somewhere? (What comes up when I run LyX varies -- this error message appears when it opens its Welcome apge. Other times it opens nothing and I just see the logo. The Export list is VERY short -- just plain text and other versions of LyX. HTML and PDF would be basic.

I got yacas from your site and it runs at the CLI but the installer says there is a menu item in Business??? The Puppy installer is not too reliable at adding items to menus though it's better than it used to be.

I installed Dia and full Inkscape without trouble.

emil
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#66 Post by emil »

Oki Doki - I fixed the link in my homepage, glad emacs works as expected.

I checked the Latex_Lyx_v09.sfs from the download page. I get a longer list for export (including DVI, HTML, Latex, Postscript, Open Document, Plain Text ... ). Also if I press the "show pdf" button the document is rendered correctly. I wonder why it shouldn't work at your place ...
md5sum is d2b610d39fed89c26db6685d598f5ece Latex_Lyx_v09.sfs
please check if this is correct!
It is true that it uses a somewhat stripped version of Latex (I think it has only Latin charactersets, no arabics or chineses).

I haven't tested Yacas in Puppy 511 - originally I made it in 431. I put it in Business because the Calculators are there in stock puppy.
If you want to have correct menu entries, please change the file /usr/share/applications/yacas.desktop

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Categories=Calculator;Science
(run refresh Desktop afterwards)

I have updated the yacas package on the server to fix this and I also put it on the homepage. Please report if you run in any further problems.

cheers 8)
emil

emil
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missing layout in Lyx

#67 Post by emil »

I must admit I don't use Lyx, but I see now what you ment in your post. Some of the layouts which are offered in the "New from Template" are missing. Some of the Templates work though.

I have no easy fix for that, I think it might depends on the cutdown latex package. Im sorry but I am unable to improve the package atm due the my schedule.

This should be a helpful Wiki page http://wiki.lyx.org/Layouts/Layouts.
for adding new layouts.

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hayden
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LyX and TeX in Sage Live

#68 Post by hayden »

OK, I don't have any solutions but I have spent some time trying to isolate the problem. The problem I was having was not with LyX layouts but with LaTeX document classes. In particular, if I tried to open the LyX welcome document it complained that the file defining the article class was missing. To see what else is missing one can ask LyX to create a new document, then look in Document > Settings. First choice on the left is Document Class and you can click to open a list of all possible classes. The list is two screens long and everything except DocBook is unavailable on my setup. While it might be OK to have 12 instead of 120, 1 is definitely too few styles. :(

So to see if the files are present I did a search for article.cls, the file that defines the missing article class. It's present, so apparently the problem is that LyX can't find it. Many attempts to address that failed but I did discover that TeX is very oddly installed. For example, the configuration files are split between /usr and the more usual /usr/share. Typing

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which latex
leads to another location but that is just a link to yet another location. In LyX, Document > Preferences lets you specify a path prefix that points to where all the files it needs may be found but it seems to assume they are all in one place.

The scattered TeX files made me wonder if the error message is from TeX rather than LyX. So I tried

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# texhash
texhash: Done.
to reconfigure TeX. This runs, but it should produce a list of what it configued so apparently it configured nothing. No next I tried to actually process a TeX file

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# tex Stats4.tex
This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeXLive2009_/_PuppyLinux)

kpathsea: Running mktexfmt tex.fmt
/usr/bin/mktexfmt: line 362: //texmf/texconfig/tcfmgr: No such file or directory
fmtutil: config file `fmtutil.cnf' not found.
I can't find the format file `tex.fmt'!
so apparently TeX can't find it's files either. So my tentative conclusion is that the problem is with TeX rather than LyX.

Has anyone managed to compile a TeX file in Sage Live?

emil
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#69 Post by emil »

Hayden,
you are probably right that in the case of Latex/Lyx the glass is rather half empty then half full. It also reminds me that writing some letters maybe doesn't qualify as a full test of a word processor.

I try to make a full texlife sfs package as a first step. I would be glad if you could test it when finished, maybe with emacs latex mode.
There is also a new Lyx version (they jumped to 2.0 recently), so that might be the next project.

thanks for bringing it up
emil

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#70 Post by emil »

Bad news: texlive is huge (full package download from their homepage is 2.3 GB )

BUT Good news:
Have a full texlive 2011 package AND the new LyX 2.0.1 running. Seems pretty well.
Lyx is surprising small, just 14 MB, but it needs QT another 19 MB.
Full texlive Package is 1.5 GB as sfs. If I remove Docs and sources then I can probably get it under a Gig.

working on it now, uploading will need time, so I think it'll be ready tomorrow.
Thinking about it again it's no wonder that there were problems with the Tex package - it was reduced to ~ 150 MB, 10 % of the full package.

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hayden
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the size of TeX

#71 Post by hayden »

I just looked at my manual for the ancient PC TeX 3.1 and it required 8.5 Mb of disk space . I have installed LyX for Windows many times -- usually unsuccessfully. It's huge and I think the pholosophy is to include everything anyone might ever need. As I recall, one install option was a smaller package set up to download missing pieces as needed. I don't know enough about the internals to advise on what to cut except that the styles, classes and templates could probably be made much shorter. As a first approximation, keep the short names and drop the long or journal-specific ones. So article.cls is needed but maybe not article-XYZ.cls or PQR-article.cls. Someone who needs them could probably find them online.

The base TeXlive package for Mepis is 18Mb and the binaries half that so it sounds like you are getting everything but the Out house sink in your download. How big is the file in the Lucid repositories? If it does require an sfs twice as big as Sage Live then maybe it should not be a part of Sage Live.

emil
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Re: the size of TeX

#72 Post by emil »

hayden wrote:I just looked at my manual for the ancient PC TeX 3.1 and it required 8.5 Mb of disk space . I have installed LyX for Windows many times
You probably mean Tex here :D .

Anyway, yes they recommend to do the full install. However installing some subsets is popular - I just checked the Ubuntu Texlive package was 130 MB. Thats approximatly the size of the popular "MiKTex" package in windows.

There is a package manager, but I didn't find how to use it yet :?:

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hayden
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LyX and TeX

#73 Post by hayden »

Actually in Windows I install LyX and IT installs MiKTeX. I do it that way because then they are installed in compatible fashion and can find one another.

Not sure which package manager you refer to. I thought Sage Live was built on Lucid Puppy and that Lucid Puppy could install Ubuntu Lucid packages? I think the default Puppy Lucid package manager has an option to look at some Ubuntu repositories but they seem small compared to all that is available for Ubuntu. I was going to say I've never installed an Ubuntu package in Puppy but maybe I have. I don't recall anything in the install procedure saying which repository a package came from.

emil
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texlive 2011

#74 Post by emil »

I know understand the TeX distribution a bit better. There is an installer which can be used to download only needed packages. But if a decent subset is installed it will still be several 100 of MB, so for puppy it is better to install this as an sfs file.

I have prepackaged the following (from small to large, small packages are subsets of the larger ones):

texlive-2011-MIN.sfs (18 MB) just bare minimum
texlive-2011-MEDIUM.sfs (177 MB) has LaTeX and recommended packages
texlive-2011-TETEX.sfs (334 MB) famous TeTeX distribution
texlive-2011-FULLAPP.sfs (551 MB) full Texlive sans docs and source
texlive-2011-FULL.sfs (1489 MB) full TexLive Package

texlive-2011-DOC-SRC.sfs (939 MB) Docs and Sourcecode

Those were made in Sage Live, but I *think* it should work in most puppies. Sure these are huge files, but they are a lot smaller than a download of the full distribution (2.4 GB on DVD iso).

Download texlive prepackaged

There is an installer which can be used to download a custom package. It is fine for full install puppies, but for frugal installs it is not straightforward how to avoid full savefiles/disks and to build a custom sfs package (it's not too difficult either).
install-tl-unx.tar.gz

To build an automated custom texlive sfs creator would be a nice little project I post a version of the new LyX soon.
kind regards
Emil

emil
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LyX-2.0.1

#75 Post by emil »

Dependencies:
qt4-4.8.0
aspell-0.60.6.1
Lyx-2.0.2

Take care 8)
emil

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hayden
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lout -- a tiny alternative to LaTeX

#76 Post by hayden »

This might be of interest for your smallest Sage Live and maybe even for the larger one.
Lout is similar in function to LaTeX and troff. Indeed, it borrows ideas, techniques and conventions from these typesetting systems. . For simple documents, Lout, LaTeX and troff offer much the same functionality, with different syntax..

Lout makes it easy to mix text and graphics. You can draw lines, arrows and boxes, scale and rotate objects, use color commands. While many of these things are possible in LaTeX by including Postscript files generated by utility programs such as xfig, you have to specify the size of each included figure, losing a lot of Lout's flexibility.

The Lout distribution is very easy to compile and maintain, which certainly is not the case of many TeX distributions. The Lout distribution is much smaller (it fits onto a floppy disk) than LaTeX, and doesn't require storing tfm and pk font outlines (since Postscript fonts are used).

On the other hand, LaTeX is much more widely used than Lout (TeX has been around since the late 1970s, Lout only since 1991). It will be easier to find a local TeXpert than a Louter, and there are many more user-contributed packages for LaTeX than for Lout. Many academic journals request (or require) that papers be submitted in LaTeX. Lout uses more memory than TeX, up to 10MB to compile large documents.

Last but not least, Lout comes with very comprehensive and comprehensible documentation. The user's guide contains all you need to know for using Lout effectively - something that is hard to find in the LaTeX world because LaTeX consists of so many different packages (which sometimes don't get along all that well).
A bit of history. Back in the 1970s mainframes offered vi and emacs to edit text and the roff family and Scribe to format text for printing. Many early home computer word processors combined stripped-down versions of Emacs and Scribe. These included Mince and Perfect Writer for CP/M and later Perfect Writer, Final Word, and Borland Sprint for DOS.

TeX originated as a typesetting language. LaTeX is a set of TeX macros that add Scribe-like document creation features to TeX. (The syntax for the added features is very similar to Scribe.) Lout, OTOH, is descended more directly from Scribe, with some features (math. equations) similar to LaTeX.

Anyway, something that fits on a floppy and has a single comprehensive user manual might be appearling to students -- or to creators of light scientific Linux distros;-)


Quote edited from

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/l ... ?title=FAQ

emil
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#77 Post by emil »

Hi hayden - I dind't knew "Lout" - nice find. Anyway I will stick with LaTeX, Libreoffice, Geany and mg. My main goal is not the size, but it should have some practical value. I think it is better to let Students use LaTeX, than to let them learn an even more "obscure" Typesetting language. Of course if the Prof. uses it, things are different ...

regarding the texlive size - with a halfway decent hardware the use of these sfs is no problem. I would even recommend to use the FULLAPP or TETEX package, because the are comprehensive and beginners shouldn't have problems with missing components.

ICPUG
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#78 Post by ICPUG »

My internet download speed is back up again.

I went to download the sagelite-serverb1.iso and this is only available from the one source which is a slower download speed. I can download the full version from mydrive quicker than the lite version!

Any chance of putting the lite versions somewhere else as well, e.g. mydrive.ch?

emil
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#79 Post by emil »

Hi,
hmm - I can pull the light version to mydrive - however I want to apply an important bugfix first. It might need a few days, because I am a bit busy atm. cheers
emil

ICPUG
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#80 Post by ICPUG »

No problems.

I can pull the latest full version until you are less busy

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