hmm...that's interesting.  I wonder why atlas did not automatically install
on my linux systems then...it did require the manual atlas install for me.
  however incompetent I am here, the average user is probably even more so.

regards,

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

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 7:14 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org> wrote:

>
> On 23 June 2013 at 18:47, ivo welch wrote:
> | thank you, dirk.  this was a very good explanation--and thank you for
> | having made the binaries available to us.  mint is based on ubuntu and
> | shares its repositories.  it's really the same basic OS, just an
> | old-stylish desktop GUI.  to summarize the most critical part of your
>
> Whtever floats your boat.  You can install several different desktop
> frameworks at once on stock Ubuntu or Debian -- even my old and tiny
> netbook
> has Ubuntu Unity, Kubuntu (KDE), stock Ubuntu Gnome, Lubuntu (LXDE),
> Xubuntu
> (XFCE) and Cinnamon just for comparison.  Not unlike BLAS libraries ....
>
> | response for the google search, the way to check whether atlas is
> | installed (short of just benchmarking it and seeing the speed up) were
> | your lines
> |
> | $ ls -l /usr/lib/libblas.so.3 /etc/alternatives/libblas.so.3
> | lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 38 Jun 23 18:08 /etc/alternatives/libblas.so.3 ->
> | /usr/lib/atlas-base/atlas/libblas.so.3
> | lrwxrwxrwx 1 root 30 May 24 10:23 /usr/lib/libblas.so.3 ->
> | /etc/alternatives/libblas.so.3
> |
> | and the first line indeed shows that I am now using libatlas.  grin.
> | elegant mechanism, actually, but a little obscure when one does not
> | know it.
> |
> | the speedup for me is spectacular.  on simon urbanek's R-benchmark-25,
> | my time goes from 30.3 sec to 9.6 sec on an i7-2660k.  and watching my
> | CPU usage with top, this seems to be the single-threaded version of
> | atlas, too.
> |
> | is it possible and/or would it make sense to add libatlas as a
> | dependency for r-base in the ubuntu .deb package, so that it is
> | automatically installed, too?  novices won't realize how they can
>
> Did you even look at, say, 'apt-cache show r-base-core | grep Depends:' ?
>
> I seem to have anticipated this very good suggestion a good nine years ago
> in
> 2004, see /usr/share/doc/r-base-core/changelog.Debian.gz :
>
> [...]
>
>
>   * debian/control: Changed Build-Depends from 'blas-dev
> (>=1.0-9),lapack-dev'
>      to 'refblas3-dev | atlas3-base-dev, lapack3-dev | atlas3-base-dev'
>   * debian/control: Dito for Depends: for r-base-dev
>   * debian/rules: Set configure arguments for refblas3/atlas3 and
>     lapack3/atlas3, respectively, instead of blas/atlas v2.
>
>  -- Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>  Sun, 29 Feb 2004 16:55:55 -0600
>
> [...]
>
> There are few more entries related to atlas there.
>
> Dirk
>
>
> | speed up R so easily, and experts can easily override it with their
> | own choice library.  libatlas can be assumed to be in the ubuntu
> | repository.  would there be a serious drawback that I am not
> | realizing?  this is of course for the general public's sake--I now
> | know how to do this and check this.
> |
> | regards,
> |
> | /iaw
> |
> | ----
> | Ivo Welch (ivo.welch@gmail.com)
>
> --
> Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd@debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com
>
>
>
>
> --
> Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd@debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com
>

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