Sage starts and computes 1+1;-) My main interest is in R. To run R you need to pull down a menu under the name of your Sage Notebook (top left of screen) that initially says Sage but needs to say "r" (small r!) I then did some basic stats with R. Number crunching seems to work but trying to plot data gives me an error message that X11 is not available. Since I am running Sage in X11, this seems odd. Googling around it appears I need devleopment libraries for X11, not just a functioning GUI. Here is simple R code to reproduce this:
Code: Select all
x <- c(1,2,3)
plot(x)
With some mesing around I was able to use the R packages already included with Sage, but attempts to install those not included gave no reposnse in Sage. Strangely, in the command-line version of R that Sage installed, I could start downloading packages. I tried Rcmdr first because it has a zillion dependencies. Looks like it may not finish today so I'll move on;-)
Let me interrupt this post to explain my interest in this project. It would be nice for professors in math/sci to hand out to students a CD with the tools they will need in their courses. In the place where I last taught this would mean R, any matrix package (such as Octave), a computer algebra system (such as Maxima) and the ability to compile C and/or Java code. Still we do not want it to get too big because student machines may not have a DVD drive or a lot of memory.
The Sage Live CD provides a lot of this. I have mixed feelings about Sage itself. The common interface is nice if you use multiple tools at once but for me it just got in the way of using R. To use regular R you just click on Console and type "R". Even a Mac user could do it;-) Sage makes you jump through a lot of hoops to get the same effect. And though you end up in a pretier terminal you still ahve to type the same text comands as in regular R. So it's a GUI only on the appearance level -- there are no menus for stats. as in Minitab or SPSS.
So, for my use I would definitely want the individual applications ready on boot up (without the student having to run a script from inside Sage). I am curious as to whether Sage takes up more or less space than jsut command-line versions or R, Octave and Maxima. (Some of those other tools are only for a very specialist minority.)
So MANY thanks to emil for his work on this. Even if the entire Sage turns out to be overkill, the process had produced all the individual pieces for us to play with!