[R] Linux Distribution Choice

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Ulises,

Thanks for the helpful post but allow me to add one or two corrections:

On 20 February 2006 at 11:40, Ulises M. Alvarez wrote:
| Ubuntu is a good choice : )
| 
| First, I will recommend you to take a look at:
| http://ubuntuguide.org/
| 
| Specially...
| http://ubuntuguide.org/#extrarepositories
| 
| It is slightly out of date, but still is useful.
| 
| Once you are done with that, installing R is quit simple. From a
| terminal -available from the menus in your panel-, type:
| 
| $ sudo aptitude install r-base r-base-core r-base-html r-recommended
| r-doc-pdf
| 
| And that's it!

The key here is the archive you point to. 

Ubuntu freezes every six months, so 5.10 does "by design" not have R 2.2.0
and 2.2.1 which were released after 5.10.  See the R FAQ for the address of
the Debian stable backport (and our thanks to Chris Steigies for building
them); once you add the line to /etc/apt/sources.list you even get current
packages so that

	$ apt-get install r-base

can do its work. aptitude, wajig, ... and dozen other frontends then will as
well, of course. The r-base meta package should imply all the one you listed
above.  This ought to work on Ubutu as well as was discussed on r-help last
week.  It may fail if and when Debian's and Ubuntu's libraries diverge.

| On the other hand, if you want to install from the source, you may try
| from a terminal the following:
| 
| $ sudo apt-get build-dep r-base
| (A lot of *.deb's here)

Actually, 'apt-get install r-base-dev' should do the trick and was designed
by Doug for just that.

| $ sudo aptitude install checkinstall
| 
| Once you are done with that, get and unpack the R-source (once again on
| a terminal):
| 
| $ wget -c http://cran.us.r-project.org/src/base/R-2/R-2.2.1.tar.gz
| $ tar -xzf R-2.2.1.tar.gz
| $ cd R-2.2.1
| $ ./configure && make && make check
| (You may like to see the results of 'make check' to asses that
| everything went fine)

Configuring that way omits a lot of little goodies we have in the Debian
package. I'd go with the prebuild ones, or locally rebuild from Debian
sources. 

| Finally:
| 
| $ sudo checkinstall
| (You may enter some info here or leave the defaults)
| 
| And that's it!
| 
| Whatever you choose, I strongly recommend to run:
| $ sudo apt-get build-dep r-base

Again, 'r-base-dev' should cover that.

| So you can install, and build, additional packages from CRAN. You may

Or just use the 50-some existing ones in Debian and (K)Ubuntu. Do a

	$ apt-cache rdepends r-base-core

to see all the packages depending on r-base-core, which includes all CRAN,
Omegahat, ... packages we currently have.  

Dirk

| cut and paste the terminal commands, just be sure to omit the '$' symbol.
| 
| Graham Smith wrote:
| > Thanks to everyone on this. Iyt ha sgiven me some useful insights into the
| > 
| >>different options. I am going to try Ubuntu for the time being and see how I
| >>get on. Probably revewing the situatin once I understand a bit more about
| >>how Linux works.
| > 
| > 
| > 
| > 
| > Graham
| > 
| > 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
| > 
| > ______________________________________________
| > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
| > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
| > PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
| > 
| 
| -- 
| U.M.A.
| http://sophie.fata.unam.mx/
| 
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-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison