[R-sig-Debian] [R] Which Linux OS on Athlon amd64, to comfortably run R?

[Tony Plate]

[moved from R-help]

Kevin Middleton wrote:
 >>> One oddity about Ubuntu is that there are no CRAN builds for 64bit.
 >> Volunteers would be welcomed with open arms.
 >>
 >
 > I don't think I know enough to volunteer (but I am open to suggestion
 > off list), but I had no difficulty installing R from source on a 64
 > bit Ubuntu machine (7.10, with, I believe, 1 GB of RAM) following the
 > instructions in R-admin. I just kept installing necessary libraries
 > until ./configure completed without errors. Then make, make check,
 > and make install ran without a hitch.
 >

I also initially compiled R from a source tarball under Ubuntu by adding 
Ubuntu packages by trial and error until ./configure completed without errors.

After some helpful tips from Dirk Eddelbuettal, I tried the following on a 
new installation of Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep r-base r-recommended

which installs all the listed dependencies for r-base and r-recommended. 
That seemed to work well for finding the dependencies necessary to compile 
R. (And if this is wrong, it's my fault, not Dirk's.)

Question: Is this the easiest recommended way to install all the 
dependencies necessary to build the latest version of R from sources under 
Ubuntu?

Other: possible sources of info:

(1) There are instructions in http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/ 
(and links from there) but those seem to be more directed at building R 
packages than R itself.

(2) There are also some notes on the Wiki at 
http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=getting-started:installation:debian#build_r 
but those suggest installing specific Debian/Ubuntu packages, rather than 
using the dependencies specified in the package descriptions.

(3) There is also a script in the message archived at 
http://www.mail-archive.com/r-sig-debian@r-project.org/msg00215.html , but 
I'm hoping the above single-line can accomplish what's needed to just build 
R from sources.

-- Tony Plate


> Kevin
> 
> -------------------------------------------------
> Kevin M. Middleton
> Department of Biology
> California State University San Bernardino
> 5500 University Parkway
> San Bernardino CA 92507
> 
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