R-beta: R rules!

[Martyn Plummer]

on 22-Oct-97 johnvv at hotmail.com wrote:

>I'm really glad to hear that R rules on Linux, because Linux rules 
>everywhere else.

There are a lot of Linux users here. This may have something to do
with the fact that Mathsoft declined to port S-PLUS to Linux.

>If time allows, the effort is well worth while to create an "rpm" file.

I already did this. The rpm packages are still experimental however
and the current rpm is an alpha release of R. It doesn't make much
sense to create prepackaged versions of software releases which are
intended for hackers (mea culpa), so after the next beta
release I shall only release rpm versions of beta or stable versions.

>rpm is the default package hanlder created by RedHat Linux, which is the 
>most popular Linux package.  Generally packages are now most commonly 
>stored in /opt/R, /usr/R, /home/R, /home/<machname>/R, or /usr/local/R.

This might be a good place to point out that the R rpms are "relocatable".
The default installation is in the /usr directory
(RHOME in /usr/lib/R, binary in /usr/bin, man page in /usr/man/man1,
documentation in /usr/doc) but you can change this with the --root
option.  Of course you must have your environment variables set up
correctly.  

>Slack, Redhat, and Caldera are all 
>good products, though I favor Caldera becuase it will very likely be the 
>first Linux to be accepted in the Corp. arena.

Possibly. They are doing a brilliant job of attracting commercial
software to Linux and expanding it into new markets, but I decided
not to use Caldera OpenLinux because
1 Unlike RedHat and Debian, they are not technological leaders
2          "              , they do not have a commitment to free
  software.
3 We tried OpenLinux Base 1.0 and were a bit disappointed by the
  age of some of the packages.
4 The desktop is nothing to get excited about

This is getting a little off-topic, so I'll stop.
Martyn 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=