[R-sig-Debian] R under Ubuntu 8.10 / Wine

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 11 November 2008 at 10:22, Wilson, Andrew wrote:
| It looks as if installing R under Ubuntu 8.10 is going to be much more
| complicated than I thought it was going to be.
| 
| I hadn't realized that it would depend on installing so many other
| packages (about 23, it seems), many of which also have their own
| dependencies.

Well, yes. R is a large system with many features. Just doing 

edd at joe:~$ r -e'print(capabilities())'
    jpeg      png     tiff    tcltk      X11     aqua http/ftp  sockets
    TRUE     TRUE     TRUE     TRUE     TRUE    FALSE     TRUE     TRUE
  libxml     fifo   cledit    iconv      NLS  profmem    cairo
    TRUE     TRUE    FALSE     TRUE     TRUE     TRUE     TRUE
edd at joe:~$

implies the need for jpeg, pmg, tcl/tk, x11, xml, cairo, ...
 
This is the packaged R. If you want a smaller one, you can try to configure
and build it differently (castrating away features) ... but building R
requires even more packages than running it.

| So I wondered whether all of these are really essential, and whether
| there is a single package anywhere that includes them all for a one-off
| download?  (As I mentioned before, my home computer is not an
| internet-connected machine, and I download files for installation to my
| pen drive at work.)

As I recall, there are tools for apt that help with this. From memory, this
is called apt-zip.
 
| I'm also wondering whether it might be easier simply to copy across my
| Windows version of R and run it with WINE.  Has anyone tried this?  Does
| it work?

Or install VMware or Virtualbox at work on Windows, run Ubuntu inside,
install R ... and copy the packages you need from /var/cache/apt/archives/ to
your usb drive.

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.