[R] R on an ASUS eee PC, continued - installing packages

[Millo Giovanni]

Dear all, 

I just went through the process of installing R on an eeePC 900 running
Linux. As a Windows useR utterly ignorant about Linux, I'd never have
done it without reading your posts and the R Wiki, so first of all:
thank you! 
Next, taking up your thread from some weeks ago, I thought this could be
useful for somebody else too, so here's what I did:

1) I followed wolfgang's step-by-step guide at
http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02a/archive/128565.html,
plus 
2) I installed the build dependencies as shown in R Wiki:

## quoting from
http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=getting-started:installation
:debian#build_r ##
How much supporting software you need to install depends on how much
compilation you want to be able to do with R. If you just want to be
able to run R, you can get r-base-core and all the recommended packages
by doing: 

sudo apt-get install r-base

If you want to be able to build and install R packages (including those
from CRAN), you can get all the common header files, as well as
r-base-core by doing: 

sudo apt-get install r-base-dev

If you want to be able to build R from its source code, you can get
build dependencies for R (e.g., compilers, header files) by doing: 

sudo apt-get build-dep r-base
## end quote ##

This way I got all the necessary compilers, headers etc. automagically
installed as well, so that install.packages() works fine now: I
installed the whole "Econometrics" task view without problems. I still
haven't tried to install Rmetrics in order to save space on the little
machine, because I do not currently need it, but it should go the same
way: maybe this can solve John's problem?

I am aware that probably removing the original OS and installing Debian
as suggested by Dirk Eddelbuettel here
http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02a/archive/128605.html would be a
better solution, but I am a complete Linux newbie, never ever tried it
before, so it's good both for me and for family use to retain the
original "easy mode" GUI while having R running on the same machine.
Full desktop mode (=standard KDE) is also easily enabled by adding
kicker and ksmserver (see http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:getkde, I did it
"the manual way" and it worked; just take heed that kicker and ksmserver
were not found in the '900's repository and I had to take them from the
'701's).

The only thing I wish I were able to do now is to have the graphics
windows defaults changed to a size fitting the small 9'' screen, as now
I have to reduce it and move it to the right by hand every time to
reproduce the results of 'windows>tile" in Windows. If anybody can
help...

HTH,
Giovanni

Giovanni Millo
Research Dept.,
Assicurazioni Generali SpA
Via Machiavelli 4, 
34131 Trieste (Italy)
tel. +39 040 671184 
fax  +39 040 671160 

# original message: 
From: John C Frain <frainj> 
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:33:31 +0100

Thanks for the step by step guide. It installs a base R and some 
libraries very well. I tries to load some of the Rmetrics libraries, 
using install.packages() nu ran into problems. I used apt-get install 
to install make and gcc from the Xandros repository. gcc also included 
binutils, gcc-4.1 and libsspo. Is there an easy answer to the 
question what I need to install to get the install process working. 
The R Installation and Administration guide says that I just need the 
compilers and tools. Installing robustbase gives the following 
messages. (If it is as simple as R not being able to find the header 
files how do I tell R where to find them?). 


Best Regards 


John 

<output in original message suppressed>

-- 
John C Frain
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2
Ireland
www.tcd.ie/Economics/staff/frainj/home.html
mailto:frainj at tcd.ie
mailto:frainj at gmail.com
 
Ai sensi del D.Lgs. 196/2003 si precisa che le informazi...{{dropped:13}}