[R-sig-Debian] Upgrading R on my EEE PC netbook

[Michael Dewey]

I have been successfully been using R on my EEE PC for some while 
now. Although it uses Xandros I have been able to install various 
pieces of software by pretending that it was Debian etch. Johannes 
was kind enough to continue providing binaries on CRAN for a while 
but I think I am the only person still living in the past as CRAN 
etch is currently stuck at 2.11.0 and I cannot rely on him to be my 
personal IT support for ever. So I decided to go it alone despite all 
the warnings against such behaviour on this list.

My plan A was to go for a mixed installation by installing from 
squeeze and risk that this would update some other software and 
chance it breaking something.
So I pointed my entries in sources.list at the squeeze Debian 
repository and at the CRAN squeeze repository and did
sudo apt-get update
sudo -s install r-base r-base-dev
and got the following response
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
   r-base-dev: Depends: build-essential but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: g++ but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: gfortran but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: libncurses5-dev but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: libreadline-dev
               Depends: libjpeg-dev
               Depends: libpcre3-dev but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: libpng12-dev but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: zlib1g-dev but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: libbz2-dev but it is not going to be installed

Now the funny thing is that if I do
which gfortran
it tells me I have gfortran on my path.

Before I move on to Plan B which is to download the sources and 
compile them myself would anyone like to advise me what is going 
wrong and whether this will mean that Plan B is doomed to fail before I start.

Plan C is to run one of the Debian or Ubuntu tailored EEE PC versions 
off a USB stuck but I find the documentation for doing that hard to grasp.

You might find it helpful to know that more or less all I know of 
Linux is gained from reading this list and that I am still at the 
stage where I regard setting up a symbolic link as a major achievement.


Michael Dewey
info at aghmed.fsnet.co.uk
http://www.aghmed.fsnet.co.uk/home.html