Anyway, the easiest way around it is to build the packages from source. So add this to your sources.list

Then do these commands

• mkdir temp/root/
• cd temp/root
• apt-get source libroot-python-dev (this downloads the source)
• cd root-system-5.17.07

Now we come up against another problem. The maxdb packages aren’t available in Lenny (I’m not sure why they were removed) but the source packages depend on them, so you’ll need to work around that. If the packages weren’t broken, you could do apt-get build-dep libroot-plugin-python. Instead, you can get the list of packages you need from debian/control. Here’s the dependencies:

Now you have to edit the Debian control files to remove the maxdb dependencies.

Edit debian/rules, and

• Delete the ‘–enable-maxdb‘ line. (You can’t comment it out in place, but you could move it down a few lines and comment it out there)
• Comment out lines 35-45, just leaving ‘SAPDB = –disable-sapdb‘

Edit debian/control to remove the dependency on libsqlod-dev in the first stanza and delete the entire root-plugin-maxdb stanza.

If you like, you can edit debian/changelog and give it a new version number. The version extension must contain a digit, e.g.

Avoid this gotcha: I’d symlinked /usr/bin/gfortran to /usr/bin/gfortran4.3 for another project. ROOT’s config/Makefile.linux checks that gcc and gfortran are the same version, so I had to undo that symlink.

Build the packages:

My build failed with this error but all of the packages seem to be there (including root-plugin-asimage, so I don’t know what it’s complaining about):

dpkg-genchanges -b >../root-system_5.17.07-1-ultrahigh1_i386.changes
dpkg-genchanges: binary-only upload – not including any source code
dpkg-genchanges: failure: cannot fstat file ../root-plugin-asimage_5.17.07-1-ultrahigh_i386.deb: No such file or directory
dpkg-buildpackage: failure: dpkg-genchanges gave error exit status 2
And if you are too lazy to build the packages and you trust me (why would you!), you can download my packages which should install OK.

Download it here:
libroot-python-dev_5.17.05-3-quickfix_i386.deb

Steps to create this:

• Get the libroot-python-dev package from the repository
  wget http://mirror.phy.bnl.gov/debian-root/...
ubuntu/pool/main/r/root-system/libroot-python-dev_5.17.05-3_i386.deb
• Unpack the .deb
  ar -x libroot-python-dev_5.17.05-3_i386.deb
• Unpack the control data:
  tar -zxf control.tar.gz
• Edit the file ‘control’ to fix the dependencies and bump the version number
• Repack control data:
  tar -zcf control.tar.gz control md5sums postinst prerm
• Repack the .deb
  ar -r libroot-python-dev_5.17.05-3-quickfix_i386.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz

I hope to help fix the underlying issue soon but right I’ve got a ton of thesis-related work to plough through so this band-aid will have to do for now.

Update 2007-12-11:
I spent a morning last week tracking down this ROOT Python bug. Turns out there was a file not being deleted during the ‘clean’ stage of the debian package creation which led to a dependency confusion with python versions. New source packages have been uploaded which fix this issue:
deb-src http://mirror.phy.bnl.gov/debian-root unstable main contrib

Binary packages should be up shortly.

Update 2009-03-02:

Noticed a typo in the re-tarring command, now fixed.

In short, here’s before and after screenshots of the plot.

Before

After

The standard palette in ROOT is so ugly it makes me want to hurl. It’s probably one of those things that some genius programmer or physicist came up with, so I don’t mind that the first attempt was ugly. ROOT is powerful and Free, so that’s all good. I do find it weird that they’ve no-one has ever replaced it as the default.

Woah! Who threw up on my plot?

Fortunately for all of us, there is a choice of two palettes to choose from in ROOT by default. The interface for setting the palette is not accessible through the GUI, but in code or in CINT one can type
gStyle->SetPalette(1);
to get the rainbow palette. Here’s what that looks like:

The rainbow palette is a lot nicer, both aesthetically and, in my opinion, it makes the ‘hot’ areas much clearer to the eye. However, by default there are still only twenty or so different colors by default and the whole thing is dominated by a big pile of green. Still not quite perfect.

Entering other numbers into gStyle->SetPalette seems to give some blocky gray plots and eventually a blue plot. Nothing as nice as the rainbow plot. However, there is a way to define new color palettes and use them. Here’s the example code as provided by Segev. :

void
set_plot_style()
{
    const Int_t NRGBs = 5;
    const Int_t NCont = 255;

    Double_t stops[NRGBs] = { 0.00, 0.34, 0.61, 0.84, 1.00 };
    Double_t red[NRGBs]   = { 0.00, 0.00, 0.87, 1.00, 0.51 };
    Double_t green[NRGBs] = { 0.00, 0.81, 1.00, 0.20, 0.00 };
    Double_t blue[NRGBs]  = { 0.51, 1.00, 0.12, 0.00, 0.00 };
    TColor::CreateGradientColorTable(NRGBs, stops, red, green, blue, NCont);
    gStyle->SetNumberContours(NCont);
}

Note: This version works in ROOT v5.16, earlier versions may have used gStyle->CreateColorGradientTable() instead of TColor::CreateColorGradientTable().

Note too that the wonderful gStyle->SetNumberContours(NCont) is what gives the plot its smooth appearance, a big improvement in itself from the default 20 or so colors.

Here’s my Python function for the same effect:

def set_palette(name=palette, ncontours=999):
    """Set a color palette from a given RGB list
    stops, red, green and blue should all be lists of the same length
    see set_decent_colors for an example"""

    if name == "gray" or name == "grayscale":
        stops = [0.00, 0.34, 0.61, 0.84, 1.00]
        red   = [1.00, 0.84, 0.61, 0.34, 0.00]
        green = [1.00, 0.84, 0.61, 0.34, 0.00]
        blue  = [1.00, 0.84, 0.61, 0.34, 0.00]
    # elif name == "whatever":
        # (define more palettes)
    else:
        # default palette, looks cool
        stops = [0.00, 0.34, 0.61, 0.84, 1.00]
        red   = [0.00, 0.00, 0.87, 1.00, 0.51]
        green = [0.00, 0.81, 1.00, 0.20, 0.00]
        blue  = [0.51, 1.00, 0.12, 0.00, 0.00]

    s = array('d', stops)
    r = array('d', red)
    g = array('d', green)
    b = array('d', blue)

    npoints = len(s)
    TColor.CreateGradientColorTable(npoints, s, r, g, b, ncontours)
    gStyle.SetNumberContours(ncontours)

And that’s how you do it. Thanks Segev!

My hopes were dashed with the news that the Brookhaven machine hosting the repository lost a hard disk and the Ubuntu repository was down. I frequently need access to ROOT packages, so I just recently built .debs from the lastest stable release (5.16.00). Here’s a guide as to how to make it work:

Install some Debian packaging tools (this might not be definitive):
apt-get install fakeroot devscripts

Install the development prerequisites (some of these might not be needed):
apt-get install libafterimage-dev libxmlrpc-c3-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libpacklib1-dev libkrb5-dev libldap2-dev libmysqlclient15-dev libpq-dev python-dev libqt3-headers libqt3-compat-headers libqt3-mt-dev qt3-dev-tools ruby1.9 ruby1.9-dev ruby1.8-dev libxml2-dev libssl-dev comerr-dev libxpm-dev libfreetype6-dev libpcre3-dev g77 libodbc++-dev libsqlod75-dev libiodbc2-dev libungif4-dev fftw3-dev krb5-user libgsl0-dev debhelper libpqxx-dev libsqldbc75-dev libttf-dev


Download the source package from the main ROOT page.

Unzip the source and change the directory name from ‘root’:
tar -zxf root_v5.16.00.source.tar.gz
mv root root-system-5.16.00

Make the .orig copy for source packages:
cp -r root-system-5.16.00 root-system-5.16.00.orig

Update debian/changelog, insert a new entry with matching version number to the root directory, add your own name and email.
root-system (5.16.00) experimental; urgency=low
* Version number bump

-- Andrew O'Neill Thu, 16 Aug 2007 02:04:02 +0200


Now, some fixes for broken things:

• For some reason, some of the builtin packages don’t get untarred during the build, this will cause an infinite error loop during build. This will fix it:

cd asimage/src/
tar -zxf libAfterImage.tar.gz


• Repeat that for unuran/src/unuran-1.0.1-root.tar.gz
• Repeat for xrootd/src/xrootd-20060928-1600.src.tgz
• For 5.16.00, there is a bug in the pgsql code that will block compilation. Edit file pgsql/src/TPgSQLServer.cxx and change the variables stmt->conn to stmt->fConn and stmt->res to stmt->fRes. This error has been fixed in the CVS version.

Build It

Get ready for the build
fakeroot debian/rules debian/control

Configure, compile, link and create packages:
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -nc

The packages

If the build succeeds, you should find the packages in the parent directory of root-system-5.16.00

Notes

Despite requesting disable-builtin-afterimage, the configure script complains that the Ubuntu version of afterimage is too new, so will use the builtin one anyway.

If the build fails and you need to reconfigure and try again without building everything from scratch, you can probably speed things up by doing:
rm config.status
debian/rules config.status

debian/rules build

The command lpr -o scaling=80 input.ps actually produced one page with a HUGE blow-up of one corner of my plot, so that obviously wasn’t working.

Using the built-in scaling in evince didn’t work either. I don’t know if that works on other files or not, I’ve never had any luck with it though.

Using the command psnup -2 input.ps (from GhostScript) should put two pages into one page (“2-up”) however it wasn’t working with the PostScript that ROOT produced, basically just giving garbage output. Looking around on the web, I found this post on the Root Talk forum which describes an extra PS command that ROOT inserts to keep CUPS happy, but which seems to break some aspects of GhostScript.

Removing the offending CUPS-appeasement lines does allow GhostScript to work with the files. You can do that with sed.
cat input.ps | sed -e "s/%%BeginSetup//" \
| sed -e "s/%%EndSetup//" > output.ps


With that fix in place, I decided that I could do better than psnup in order to resize the plots (80% is a better fit to my notebook). In the end, I came up with the following script:

#!/bin/bash

# take ROOT output (or any postscript) and strip the
# extra commands that seem to break GhostScript,
# then resize to 70% of the size and print

scale=0.8
paper="letter"

function usage() {
    echo "Usage: lpr_70 [lpr options] input.ps"
    exit 2
}

# separate postscript file from other lpr arguments
lpr_args=""
input=""
for arg in $*; do
    ext=`echo "$arg" |awk -F '.' '{print $NF}'`
    if [ "$ext" == "ps" ]; then
        input="$arg"
    elif [ "$arg" == "--help" ]; then
        usage;
    else
        lpr_args="$lpr_args $arg"
    fi
done

# parse the filename a little
ext=`echo "$input" |awk -F '.' '{print $NF}'`
base=`basename "$input" .$ext`
temp1="/tmp/$base.strip.ps"
temp2="/tmp/$base.$scale.ps"

# strip the extra ROOT postscript commands that cause trouble
cat $input | sed -e "s/%%BeginSetup//" | sed -e "s/%%EndSetup//"  > $temp1

# Scale using pstops
pstops -p$paper 1:0@$scale $temp1 $temp2

# Send to the printer
lpr $lpr_args $temp2

# remove the temporary files
rm $temp1 $temp2