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

[John C Nash]

I don't know how committed you are to the Xandros interface. I am friends with some of the
people who built that distro here in Ottawa. They did a good job, but the distro is now
dead, and they don't use it themselves any more, so you will definitely be on your own.

For what it is worth, I've found R runs very nicely on the Eee's using CrunchBang linux,
which is a debian squeeze variant. I can use the R debian packages.

Best, JN


On 11/30/2011 10:33 AM, Michael Dewey wrote:
> 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
> 
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