dave559's questions

We run a Jobe server for use by our CodeRunner install, including Octave on it. We have previously been asked to include the octave-symbolic package as part of our install.

We are now trying to build a new server using Ubuntu 22.04/jammy, but it looks as though the octave-symbolic package does not exist for this release.

As sysadmins, we do not use Octave ourselves. Does anyone know whether the octave-symbolic functionality is now included in the main Octave package, in a different Octave package, or whether it is lacking a maintainer (or has had problems making it not possible to release it for Ubuntu 22.04)?

I have recently installed KDE 5 (kde-plasma-desktop) on Ubuntu 20.04, and as part of the installation, it asked me to switch the login screen manager to sddm.

When sddm starts (either on boot, or after logging out) it blocks the screen with a large on-screen keyboard (the rest of the screen is black), and I cannot get rid of the keyboard without clicking the "hide keyboard" 'key' with the mouse, after which the sddm login screen appears. Although I can understand that there might be accessibility reasons for this, I can see no way to switch this off (I am the only user of this computer), so it is rather annoying.

Is there a way to prevent this on-screen keyboard from appearing unrequested, or, alternatively, would KDE actually work quite happily with gdm3 as the login screen manager (or another manager, such as lightdm) instead?

I am trying to set up a new Ubuntu 20.04 server (to replace an older 18.04 server) which needs to have the R statistics system and, in particular, the r-cran-tidyverse package installed.

I am using the CRAN repository as it seems to be recommended, for R packages, in preference to Ubuntu's own repository, as the CRAN repo has more packages available.

• https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/

I have added the repo:

echo "deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu focal-cran40/" \
 | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/focal-cran40.list

and imported its security key

# apt-key may fail because of firewall restrictions, so try
gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9
#
# Do not forget the trailing dash!
gpg -a --export E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9 | sudo apt-key add -

and then installed the base packages

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r-base

So far, so good.

My notes for Ubuntu 18.04 said, to add marutter's repo for additional R packages, to do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:marutter/c2d4u3.5
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install r-cran-tidyverse

It looks as though (from the CRAN page linked above) that the marutter repos (or another additional R repos) have changed since then.

Is it now the cran2deb4ubuntu 4.0 (c2d4u4.0+) repo that I need to use instead to install r-cran-tidyverse (following the instructions on that repo's page)?

I am attempting to install Maxima on Ubuntu 20.04 (on a headless server for use programmatically), but, unlike previous releases which had the graphical interface as a separate additional package, the maxima package in this release now seems to bring in a large number of X and Gnome dependencies.

Is there a way that I can install only the packages needed for the command line version of Maxima, as I would prefer not to bring in a whole X environment on to a headless server unnecessarily?

I am trying to install Ubuntu 20.04 on a VMware virtual machine, using ubuntu-20.04-live-server-amd64.iso as the boot image, and installing via VMware Remote Console, but without any success.

When trying to boot, I get the ISOLINUX status line, the (unhelpful) graphical screen with the keyboard and human logos, but then:

Sometimes I get the language selection, can select "English", and then get the list of boot options, but my keypresses seem to be ignored at that point, so cannot proceed further.

On some other occasions, the keyboard/human screen remains for at least a minute, and then eventually the boot process falls back to a text console and displays various errors:

piix4_smbus 0000:00:07.3: SMBus Host Controller not enabled!
sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
ln: /tmp/mountroot-fail-hooks.d//scripts/init-premount/lvm2: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /cow on /root/cow failed: No such file or directory
Checking integrity, this may take some time
Connecting to plymouth: Connection refused

The boot process then just seems to hang, seemingly indefinitely (although the progress (or lack thereof) dots continue). It seems that it does not have super cow powers, unfortunately.

It eventually turns out that, after waiting approximately 20 minutes, the lack-of-progress dots come to an end, and then, finally, the text mode installer starts (and can install successfully). I wouldn't regard this as a proper solution, however. I was considering installing a minimal 18.04 and then upgrading from there as a work-around instead.

Has anyone else experienced anything similar or have any advice?

I have been reading up about how to install the R statistics system on Ubuntu (16.04 LTS).

R is in the Ubuntu repositories (as are many CRAN packages), but quite a lot of documentation and answers seem to recommend installing from the CRAN repos instead?

I realise that the versions in the Ubuntu repo are likely to be somewhat older, but does it contain most/all of the additional CRAN R packages, and I would only really need to use the CRAN repo if there is genuine need for newer packages, or should I just add the CRAN repo to our system anyway?

(My instinct is always to try to minimise variations from the standard Ubuntu packages wherever possible, but I suppose this is rather more of a concern in practice when installing individual third-party .deb packages than adding a (hopefully) well-organised and managed repo?)