[R] R on 64-bit Linux machine

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, Vadim Ogranovich wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We are planning to buy a 64-bit Linux machine which will mainly run R.
> There was an interesting thread on 64-bits on r-help back in April that
> basically confirmed that the 64-bit R is fine as long as the length of
> an atomic object is less than 2^31 - 1.

That's an R limitation, not a 64-bit version one.

> My specific question is on which 64-bit Linux distros (SUSE or RedHat)
> and processors R is *known* to build out-of-box and run well. Ease of
> maintenance is essential here. We have RedHat 7.3 on other (32-bit)
> machines and would try not to proliferate the OS-s.

Not RHEL 3: we sent that back for a refund and its compilers are too old 
to work well on AMD64. Fedora Core 3 is fine on AMD64, and is what I would 
recommend.  We also run SuSe 9.1, but for people used to RH, Fedora is 
more familiar.

CRAN will have 64-bit RPMs for x86_64 FC3 come R 2.0.1 (released on 
Monday)

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595