dear debian-R group:

I am using the stock ubuntu binary R 3.0.1 for ubuntu raring but on
cinnamon mint olivia 15.

I read dirk's gcbd paper from a couple of years ago.  it suggests that
stock blas is pretty bad compared to the four main alternatives.   of
course, dirk also maintains the binaries for debian/ubuntu R, so he
probably knows the answer off hand.

I installed libatlas3-base (3.8.4-9ubuntu1)  from the software
repositories.  ldd tells me that this is not enough ( ldd
/usr/lib/R/bin/exec/R | grep -i atlas).  libatlas use is not determined at
compile time.  I also redownloaded the 'r-base' binary to check whether it
is determined at download time.  this did not make R use atlas, either.

so, I wanted to confirm what I think it is: one needs to source compile R
to take advantage of the atlas (or any other accelerated) blas library.
correct?

(would it make sense to bundle the R binary distribution with atlas?  disk
space is no longer an issue nowadays, and this would probably make life
better for many users.)

regards,

/iaw
----
Ivo Welch (ivo.welch@gmail.com)
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