[R-sig-teaching] installing Rcmdr

[Robert W. Hayden]

Last weekend I visited my sister and her husband and installed R on
their Ubuntu 8.04 machine and tried to add Rcmdr.  I had endless
trouble most of which seemed to be because R (or Rcmdr) seemed to want
a Fortran compiler (or a Fortran-to-C translator).  A smaller number
of error mesages (out of many pages thereof) were removed by
installing what appeared to be a library of Fortran linear algebra
routines (lblas?).  Even then Rcmdr complained about missing packages
when I ran it, and though it offered to install them, the installation
failed in every case, with no useful error messages.  

I have installed R and Rcmdr many times before to Windows and various
Linux distributions (it's on this Debian right now)  and never had so
much trouble.  Did I do something wrong?  Is there a problem with R on
Ubuntu?  I have programmed in Fortran so I don't mind adding a
compiler and I've taught linear algebra so I don't mind adding linear
algebra routines, but there is no way my students would ever figure
out that was needed.  I also noted that Rcmdr had a MUCH longer list
of dependencies than I remember.  All of this has me worried about
using R in an introductory course for folks who are not computer
science majors.  

Has anyone encountered a similar problem?  I used whatever version of
R is in the Ubuntu repository.  I seem to remember 2.4 though that
seems a bit old.

------->  First-time AP Stats. teacher?  Help is on the way! See

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