[R] Linux Distribution Choice

[Ulises M. Alvarez]

Ubuntu is a good choice : )

First, I will recommend you to take a look at:
http://ubuntuguide.org/

Specially...
http://ubuntuguide.org/#extrarepositories

It is slightly out of date, but still is useful.

Once you are done with that, installing R is quit simple. From a
terminal -available from the menus in your panel-, type:

$ sudo aptitude install r-base r-base-core r-base-html r-recommended
r-doc-pdf

And that's it!


On the other hand, if you want to install from the source, you may try
from a terminal the following:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep r-base
(A lot of *.deb's here)

$ sudo aptitude install checkinstall

Once you are done with that, get and unpack the R-source (once again on
a terminal):

$ wget -c http://cran.us.r-project.org/src/base/R-2/R-2.2.1.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf R-2.2.1.tar.gz
$ cd R-2.2.1
$ ./configure && make && make check
(You may like to see the results of 'make check' to asses that
everything went fine)

Finally:

$ sudo checkinstall
(You may enter some info here or leave the defaults)

And that's it!

Whatever you choose, I strongly recommend to run:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep r-base

So you can install, and build, additional packages from CRAN. You may
cut and paste the terminal commands, just be sure to omit the '$' symbol.

Graham Smith wrote:
> Thanks to everyone on this. Iyt ha sgiven me some useful insights into the
> 
>>different options. I am going to try Ubuntu for the time being and see how I
>>get on. Probably revewing the situatin once I understand a bit more about
>>how Linux works.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Graham
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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