[R] Ryacas not working properly

[Paul Smith]

On 11/19/06, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz at comcast.net> wrote:
> this might be a firewall/SELinux/"On Demand Services" problem, I have, I
> think, nailed it down to two key things on FC6:
>
> 1. It requires the use of the '--enable-server' configure option for
> yacas itself.
>
> 2. There is a directory permissions problem in the Ryacas package,
> restricting a regular user's access to the files located in the 'yacdir'
> subdirectory.
>
> Note that in the instructions below, I also install the GSL, which
> presumably is not required, but I did it anyway after noting some
> warnings during the yacas build process.
>
> One other thing, which is that when downloading the Ryacas package from
> the Google site using Firefox, the file is downloaded as:
>
>   Ryacas_0.2 3.tar.gz
>
> Note the missing '-' between the 2 and 3.  Be sure to check for this
> when saving the tarball to disk.
>
>
> So here goes:
>
>
> 1. Install the GSL (including the devel RPM) as root:
>
>   yum install gsl*
>
>
>
>
> 2. Install yacas from the source tarball using:
>
>   ./ configure --enable-server
>   make
>
>   then as root:
>
>   make install
>
>
>
>
> 4. Install the Ryacas package as root:
>
>   R CMD INSTALL Ryacas_0.2-3.tar.gz
>
>
> Be sure that you also have the 'XML' package from CRAN installed, which
> is a dependency for Ryacas.
>
>
>
>
> 3. Change the permissions for /usr/local/lib/R/library/Ryacas/yacdir:
>
> Note that the default permission for this directory after installation
> is:
>
> drwxr--r-- 2 root root  4096 Nov 19 15:17 yacdir
>
>
> Thus:
>
>  su
>  chmod +x /usr/local/lib/R/library/Ryacas/yacdir
>
>
> Now:
>
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root  4096 Nov 19 15:17 yacdir
>
>
>
> Now in R as a regular user:
>
> > library(Ryacas)
> Loading required package: XML
>
> > yacas("5/8 * 3/4")
> [1] "Starting Yacas!"
> Accepting requests from port 9734
> expression(15/32)
>
> > yacas("3/7 * 5/9")
> expression(5/21)

There a side effect that I would like to remove: yacas compiled with
the option '--enable-server' runs like this

In> x := 2
<OMOBJ>
  <OMI>2</OMI>
</OMOBJ>
In> x
<OMOBJ>
  <OMI>2</OMI>
</OMOBJ>
In>

i.e., with, apparently, xml commands. How can one run yacas normally,
without those pieces of xml?

Paul