How to Install R in CentOS 5.6

R is in EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux):

EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs, such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.

As part of the Fedora packaging community, EPEL packages are 100% free/libre open source software (FLOSS).

All you need to install R is to add the EPEL repository and then install R the same way you do with any other package: Continue reading

Running Firefox with Different Profiles

This post tells nothing new but it’s something I must have tried a long time ago.

Firefox is the best browser I know…. but is not perfect. One of the major problems I experience with Firefox is that when you start installing some extensions and combine that with a lot of tabs opened at the same time, things stop being nice and you start feeling like you’re running the browser in your grandma’s computer.

Most of the extensions I use are for development purposes only, so one way to have a better browsing experience is to have separated profiles. A profile for normal browsing (email and blog reading, facebook, twitter, …) and another for development with all the nice extensions I use when working. Now you can get rid of your  development stuff by closing the browser instance that is using that profile and keep surfing the web with the lighter profile, or viceversa.

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How to Install Aptana Studio 3 in Fedora 15

A friend told me about Aptana Studio, an Open Source web development IDE. I think I used it years ago but then switched to NetBeans for some reason. After taking a look at Aptana’s website I decided I wanted to try it again. Below are three simple steps I followed to install Aptana Studio in Fedora 15.

  1. Download Apatana Studio 3 from http://www.aptana.com/products/studio3/download and extract the content of the downloaded zip file.
  2. Move Aptana Studio 3 to a standard location
    mv Aptana Studio 3 /usr/local/aptana-studio-3
  3. Create a file /usr/share/applications/aptana.desktop with the following content:
    [gist id=1024232]

Although Aptana can be easily run just after you download the application, I like to have menu entries for most of the software I use, hopefully I’m not the only one who thinks like that and the above can help them.

Mendeley 0.9.8 installer for Fedora 14 and Fedora 15

Recently I wrote about how to solve some issues with Mendeley Desktop in Fedora 14 but in that post I didn’t show how to properly install the application adding the necessary menu entries and installing the files in the right directories. The ideal approach would be to create an RPM to handle de installation process, however, this time I just created a short script that downloads Mendeley Desktop, install the files and apply the fixes from my previous post. Continue reading

Running Mendeley 0.9.8 on Fedora 14 (x86_64)

Mendeley is a combination of a desktop application and a website which helps you manage, share and discover both content and contacts in research.

The Desktop version offers automatic extraction of document details, management of your papers with full text search, sharing and synchronization, among other features. The website provides an online backup of your library, a variety of statistics about your research behavior, a research network and a recommendation engine for papers that might interest you.

When I discover this application I thought it was awesome and wanted to use it for my own research needs. However, every time I tried to install it on my fedora (first fedora 13 and now fedora 14) I was presented with some problem: sometimes I couldn’t even start the application because Mendeley was unable to load libssl, although the library was packed with Mendeley Desktop for Generic Linux. When I was finally able to fix the problem linking the version of  libssl installed in the system, the application wouldn’t start due to a compatibility problem between the system’s libssl and the Qt libraries packed with Mendeley so I had to download the latest Qt for my system and remove the packed libraries in order to finally run application. However, there was another problem, I could explore my local library and add new papers but couldn’t synch that information with my account on the website… and it was like that for a long time, until today, when I decided to look for a solution again and this time I found it. Continue reading