Getting SageTeX to work on Ubuntu

Since I'm using Sage more, I'm trying to get SageTeX working, so I can embed Sage into LaTeX documents (i.e. have a report on the methods integrated with the code that implements the methods and generates the results. Search for 'Literate Programming' or 'Sweave' for many references on this)

On Ubuntu, after I copied SageTeX files to my local LaTeX configuration directory (as per instructions in the Sage Installation Guide, I still got errors when trying to build the example documents

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "st_example.py", line 7, in
_st_.inline(_sage_const_0 , number_of_partitions(_sage_const_5 ))
File "/home/lluang/Apps/sage-4.7.2/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/sagetex.py", line 86, in inline
'}{{%\n' + s.rstrip() + '}{}{}{}{}}\n')
File "element.pyx", line 331, in sage.structure.element.Element.__getattr__ (sage/structure/element.c:2868)
File "parent.pyx", line 327, in sage.structure.parent.getattr_from_other_class (sage/structure/parent.c:3193)
AttributeError: 'sage.rings.integer.Integer' object has no attribute 'rstrip'

**** Running Sage on st_example.sage failed! Fix st_example.tex and try again.


So what happened? Apparently, one of the Ubuntu texlive packages (specifically texlive-latex-extra) includes an outdated version of the sagetex.sty file while what is needed is one tailored to the current version of Sage (and included in the Sage distribution). While I have the correct version in a local directory, there is a precedence issue when multiple LaTeX style files are present. Since I don't have the inclination to figure out the issue, I found the location of the wrong sagetex.sty file, and deleted the entire directory (/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/sagetex). Now, SageTeX works, and I can start writing papers using Sage/Python, just like I do using Sweave for R.