[R] from XPPro to Linux what distribution to use for R ?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sat, 10 Nov 2007, phguardiol at aol.com wrote:

> Dear R users
>
> I m planning to move to Linux to use R (currently under Win XPPro on a 32bit PC with 4 Go RAM), I have 2 questions:

> - is there a recommended "version/distribution" of Linux to run?R and 
> Bioconductor packages: Fedora ? Ubuntu ? Suse ? Debian ?

Any of those.  I'd say the main reasons for choosing a Linux distribution 
should be the availability of support first and individual preference 
second.  There are so many distributions just because none is best for 
everyone.

> - Regarding Fedora, I see that now it is version 8 available on the web, 
> but on R website I can only see R Fedora 7 version (no F8); so?does R 
> for Fedora 7 work with Fedora 8 ?

F8 was released on Thursday: it has R RPMs available as part of Fedora. 
You can also build from the sources.  I expect RPMs will arrive on CRAN in 
a few days, but there are a few issues that might delay them (one is
reported in this thread
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2007-November/047397.html).


Although there are binaries on CRAN for several distributions, they are 
also to found on some of the distributions' own repositories and 
elsewhere.


-- 
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