[R] Portable R?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 17 November 2005 at 14:16, David Mitchell wrote:
| Hello list,
| 
| A short time ago, I found
| http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/portable_apps_suite/, which
| contains basically a complete set of office tools that can be run
| *entirely* from a USB key.  The concept is:
| - find a Windows PC
| - put in your USB key
| - run OpenOffice, Firefox, Gaim, Nvu, Thunderbird, ... directly from
| your USB key, with no app installation required
| - save your files wherever
| - remove your USB key and leave, with nothing installed on the original PC
| 
| As a consultant who battles regularly with limited toolsets at
| customer sites, this strikes me as an extremely handy way of working.
| 
| Has anyone managed to setup a base R configuration that runs entirely
| from USB key?  Being a regular user, but no expert, with R, it'd be
| very helpful for me if such a mechanism existed, but I've got no idea
| where to begin in building such a thing.

Short answer:
	Yes but using Linux, requiring a larger USB stick and some fiddling.

Longer answer: 
	Quantian (http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian) is a "everything, 
the kitchen sink and some" Linux distribution running off a DVD. Quantian is
focussed on quantitative / numeric apps, and tends to include R plus related
goodies -- the last release had an almost complete set of CRAN and
BioConductor packages. The raw size of the last release is around 2 GB,
corresponding to 6.6 GB expanded.  Marco Caliari, who often contributes
improved boot code to Quantian, has managed to boot Quantian off a USB
stick. I didn't manage to do that with my laptop, possibly because of
limitations in its bios. Some of this was discussed in past threads on the
quantian-general mailing list.

Lots-o-work suggestion:
	To not require a huge USB stick, you could try to shrink a given live
cdrom such as Knoppix or Ubuntu, then add R and other goodies such that
you're left with around 512 MB compressed. Then throw it onto a USB stick and
make it bootable.

Shortcut:
	Order a Quantian DVD. Some folks sell them pre-made for less than $5.
Experiment with that, If you like it, consider making your own mini-distro.
Or stick with the DVD and use it directly with the USB stick for your
configuration, data, demos, ...

Even shorter:
	R is perfectly "relocatable". If you install the Windows binary onto
the USB drive, it will run fine. You'll probably need to add editors and
other tools.

Hope this helps, Dirk

-- 
Statistics: The (futile) attempt to offer certainty about uncertainty.
         -- Roger Koenker, 'Dictionary of Received Ideas of Statistics'