Dirk Eddelbuettel: #40: Another r2u Example Making Colab Easier
Welcome to the 40th post in the $R^4 series. This
one will just be a very brief illustration of r2u use in what might be
an unexpected place: Google
Colab. Colab has a strong bent towards Jupyter and Python but has
been supporting R compute kernels for some time (by changing what they
call the runtime ). And with a little exploration one can identify
these are (currently, as of July 2023) running Ubuntu 20.04 aka
focal .
Which is of course one of two system supported by our lovely r2u project (with the
other being the newer 22.04 aka jammy ). And I mostly tweeted / tooted
about r2u since the its
introduction in #37. And gave basically just a mention in passing in
faster
feedback post #38 as well as the faster
feedback in ci post #39). So a brief recap may be in order. In
essence, r2u makes all
of CRAN available as
full-fledged Ubuntu binaries with complete and full dependencies which
are then installed directly and quickly via apt. Which, to
top it of, are accessed directly from R via
install.packages() so no special knowledge or sauce needed.
We often summarize it as fast, easy, reliable: what is not to
like .
And, as we established in a few minutes of probing, it also works in
the focal -based Colab session. The screen shot shows the basic step of
fetching the setup script (for plain Ubuntu focal system) from r2u, making it executable
and running it. Total time: 34 seconds. And after that we see the pure
magic of install.packages("tidyverse") installing
all of it in nine seconds. Additionally, we add the
brms package in thirty-one seconds cia
install.packages("brms"). Both load just fine and echo
their current values.
r2u on colab focal
download.file("https://github.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/raw/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_focal.sh",
"add_cranapt_focal.sh")
Sys.chmod("add_cranapt_focal.sh", "0755")
system("./add_cranapt_focal.sh")
install.packages("tidyverse")
library(tidyverse)
install.packages("brms")
library(brms)rocker/r2u:jammy.
More information about r2u is at its site, and we
answered some question in issues, and at stackoverflow. More questions
are always welcome!
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at
GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
Another minor maintenance release, now at version 0.0.20, of 
No per odo de 25 a 27 de maio, Bras lia foi palco da
Atividades
A programa o da MiniDebConf foi intensa e diversificada. Nos dias 25 e 26
(quinta e sexta-feira), tivemos palestras, debates, oficinas e muitas atividades
pr ticas. J no dia 27 (s bado), ocorreu o Hacking Day, um momento especial em
que os(as) colaboradores(as) do Debian se reuniram para trabalhar em conjunto em
v rios aspectos do projeto. Essa foi a vers o brasileira da Debcamp, tradi o
pr via DebConf. Nesse dia, priorizamos as atividades pr ticas de contribui o
ao projeto, como empacotamento de softwares, tradu es, assinaturas de chaves,
install fest e a Bug Squashing Party.
N meros da edi o
Os n meros do evento impressionam e demonstram o envolvimento da comunidade com
o Debian. Tivemos 236 inscritos(as), 20 palestras submetidas, 14 volunt rios(as)
e 125 check-ins realizados. Al m disso, nas atividades pr ticas, tivemos
resultados significativos, como 7 novas instala es do Debian GNU/Linux, a
atualiza o de 18 pacotes no reposit rio oficial do projeto Debian pelos
participantes e a inclus o de 7 novos contribuidores na equipe de tradu o.
Destacamos tamb m a participa o da comunidade de forma remota, por meio de
transmiss es ao vivo. Os dados anal ticos revelam que nosso site obteve 7.058
visualiza es no total, com 2.079 visualiza es na p gina principal (que contava
com o apoio de nossos patrocinadores), 3.042 visualiza es na p gina de
programa o e 104 visualiza es na p gina de patrocinadores. Registramos 922
usu rios(as) nicos durante o evento.
No 
Fotos e v deos
Para revivermos os melhores momentos do evento, temos dispon veis fotos e v deos.
As fotos podem ser acessadas em: 
A MiniDebConf Bras lia 2023 foi um marco para a comunidade Debian, demonstrando
o poder da colabora o e do Software Livre. Esperamos que todas e todos tenham
desfrutado desse encontro enriquecedor e que continuem participando ativamente
das pr ximas iniciativas do Projeto Debian. Juntos, podemos fazer a diferen a!
Reduce the size of your c: partition to the smallest it can be and then turn off windows with the understanding that you will never boot this system on the iron ever again.
To find the literal path names of your detected drives you can run fdisk -l. Pay attention to the names of the partitions and the sizes of the drives to help determine which is which.
Once you have a shell in the netinst installer, you should maybe be able to run a command like the following. This will duplicate the disk located at if (in file) to the disk located at of (out file) while showing progress as the status.
In the New VM window, select Import existing disk image 
When prompted for the path to the image, use the one we created with sudo qemu-img convert above.
Select the version of Windows you want.
Select memory and CPUs to allocate to the VM.
Tick the Customize configuration before install box
If you re prompted to enable the default network, do so now.
The default hardware layout should probably suffice. Get it as close to the underlying hardware as it is convenient to do. But Windows is pretty lenient these days about virtualizing licensed windows instances so long as they re not running in more than one place at a time.
Good luck! Leave comments if you have questions.
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Did you follow the instructions linked above in the prerequisites section? If not, take a moment to do so now.
You may be warned that Rufus will be acting as dd.
Don t forget to select the USB drive that you want to write the image to. In my example, the device is creatively called NO_LABEL .
You may be warned that re-imaging the USB disk will result in the previous data on the USB disk being lost.
Once the process is complete, the application will indicate that it is complete.
You should now have a USB disk with the Proxmox installer image on it. Place the USB disk into one of the blue, USB-3.0, USB-A slots on the Qotom device so that the system can read the installer image from it at full speed. The Proxmox installer requires a keyboard, video and mouse. Please attach these to the device along with inserting the USB disk you just created.
Press the power button on the Qotom device. Press the F11 key repeatedly until you see the AMI BIOS menu. Press F11 a couple more times. You ll be presented with a boot menu. One of the options will launch the Proxmox installer. By trial and error, I found that the correct boot menu option was UEFI OS
Once you select the correct option, you will be presented with a menu that looks like this. Select the default option and install.
During the install, you will be presented with an option of the block device to install to. I think there s only a single block device in this celeron, but if there are more than one, I prefer the smaller one for the ProxMox OS. I also make a point to limit the size of the root filesystem to 16G. I think it will take up the entire volume group if you don t set a limit.
Okay, I ll do another install and select the correct filesystem.
If you read this far and want me to add some more screenshots and better instructions, leave a comment.
This post serves as a report from my attendance to Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2023 Europe that took place in
Amsterdam in April 2023. It was my second time physically attending this conference, the first one was in
Austin, Texas (USA) in 2017. I also attended once in a virtual fashion.
The content here is mostly generated for the sake of my own recollection and learnings, and is written from
the notes I took during the event.
The very first session was the opening keynote, which reunited the whole crowd to bootstrap the event and
share the excitement about the days ahead. Some astonishing numbers were announced: there were more than
10.000 people attending, and apparently it could confidently be said that it was the largest open source
technology conference taking place in Europe in recent times.
It was also communicated that the next couple iteration of the event will be run in China in September 2023
and Paris in March 2024.
More numbers, the CNCF was hosting about 159 projects, involving 1300 maintainers and about 200.000
contributors. The cloud-native community is ever-increasing, and there seems to be a strong trend in the
industry for cloud-native technology adoption and all-things related to PaaS and IaaS.
The event program had different tracks, and in each one there was an interesting mix of low-level and higher
level talks for a variety of audience. On many occasions I found that reading the talk title alone was not
enough to know in advance if a talk was a 101 kind of thing or for experienced engineers. But unlike in
previous editions, I didn t have the feeling that the purpose of the conference was to try selling me
anything. Obviously, speakers would make sure to mention, or highlight in a subtle way, the involvement of a
given company in a given solution or piece of the ecosystem. But it was non-invasive and fair enough for me.
On a different note, I found the breakout rooms to be often small. I think there were only a couple of rooms
that could accommodate more than 500 people, which is a fairly small allowance for 10k attendees. I realized
with frustration that the more interesting talks were immediately fully booked, with people waiting in line
some 45 minutes before the session time. Because of this, I missed a few important sessions that I ll
hopefully watch online later.
Finally, on a more technical side, I ve learned many things, that instead of grouping by session I ll group
by topic, given how some subjects were mentioned in several talks.
On gitops and CI/CD pipelines
Most of the mentions went to 
On etcd, performance and resource management
I attended a talk focused on etcd performance tuning that was very encouraging. They were basically talking
about the 
On jobs
I attended a couple of talks that were related to HPC/grid-like usages of Kubernetes. I was truly impressed
by some folks out there who were using Kubernetes Jobs on massive scales, such as to train machine learning
models and other fancy AI projects.
It is acknowledged in the community that the early implementation of things like Jobs and CronJobs had some
limitations that are now gone, or at least greatly improved. Some new functionalities have been added as
well. Indexed Jobs, for example, enables each Job to have a number (index) and process a chunk of a larger
batch of data based on that index. It would allow for full grid-like features like sequential (or again,
indexed) processing, coordination between Job and more graceful Job restarts. My first reaction was: Is that
something we would like to enable in 
Yesterday, the UBports core developer team released Ubuntu Touch Focal OTA-1
(In fact, Raoul, Marius and I were in a conference call when Marius froze and said: the PR team already posted the release blog post; the post is out, but we haven't released yet... ahhhh... panic... Shall I?, Marius said, and we said: GO!!! This is why the release occurred in public five hours ahead of schedule. OMG.)
For all the details, please study:
