I have been compiling R from source tar balls on Ubuntu for many years and
like the way Ubuntu manges dependency.

Best,
Shige

On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org> wrote:

>
> On 8 February 2009 at 17:27, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> | The R FAQ is very helpful about installing R on various Linuxes, but
> doesn't
> | seem to discuss the advantages of one distribution over another.  I am
> new
> | to Linux (though not to Unix!), and would appreciate some guidance from
> | those with experience.
> |
> | I plan to set up a headless Linux x86 server for the sole purpose of
> running
> | 64-bit R. Are there reasons to prefer some Linux distributions over
> others?
> | I have no preference between binary and source distributions of R, as
> along
> | as they are complete, up-to-date, easy to install, and easy to update.
> |
> | I would be accessing the server through my Windows desktop using
> Emacs/ESS.
> | What is the recommended way to display plots on the desktop? An X server?
> A
> | display Postscript server? Something else?
> |
> | My data come out of a DBMS; do some Linux distributions have better ODBC
> | drivers than others?
>
> Good question, and while it in general may depend on your preferences and
> tastes, there are some things that make the Ubuntu amd64 _server_ flavour
> appealing for your situation:
>
> - it is meant for servers, so no extra desktop apps or processes
>
> - Ubuntu amd64 has support via CRAN's binary set of R packages, ie you get
>  a pre-built R 2.8.1 without any extra work
>
> - additional goodies such as ESS, littler, ... available via CRAN as well
>  in updated packages
>
> - you still have the usual 20,000+ Ubuntu packages, including iodbc and
>  unixodbc and number of related packages:
>    edd@joe:~$ apt-cache search odbc| wc -l
>    101
>    edd@joe:~$
>
> It so happens that I just installed another compute server at work on
> Friday.
> I had a cdrom handy with Ubuntu 8.04 for amd64/server -- the install was
> done
> in a few minutes, as was the on-line upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10.  All in under
> 300 packages were installed as I chose a lean default.  You can probably
> achieve the same using Debian's install cdroms. Your mileage may vary but a
> number of us have been happy with this.  And to connect, I use Cygwin's x11
> server which got updated recently and have no issues.
>
> Hth, Dirk
>
> --
> Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.
>
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