R help - Aug 2005 - R binaries

Dear Rexperts,

I intend to burn some R CDs to colleagues in Vietnam.  I want to put all
binary files for base as well as contributed packages (for both Windows
and Linux). It is very time consuming if I download files by files. Is
there a place a can buy a CD with all the mentioned files?

Regards,
-- 
Nam-Ky Nguyen, Senior Lecturer
School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science
University of New England, Armidale NSW 2351 Australia
nkn at turing.une.edu.au              Tel: +612 6773 2763
http://turing.une.edu.au/~nkn      Fax: +612 6773 3312

Please convert Word files into PDF files before sending them to me.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

G'day Nam-Ky,
>>>>> "NKN" == Nam-Ky Nguyen <nkn at
turing.une.edu.au> writes:
    NKN> I intend to burn some R CDs to colleagues in Vietnam.  I want
    NKN> to put all binary files for base as well as contributed
    NKN> packages (for both Windows and Linux).
I don't believe that precompiled binary files for Linux exist, since
they would depend very much on which flavour of Linux you are running.

    NKN> It is very time consuming if I download files by files. Is
    NKN> there a place a can buy a CD with all the mentioned files?
Not that I am aware off.  But I would do the following for easy
download of all contributed files:  Issue  from an R session the
following commands (mostly untested):
> options(repos=c(CRAN="http://cran.au.r-project.org/"))
> tmp <- available.packages()  # Or just use CRAN.packages() ??
## To download all source files
> download.packages(tmp, destdir=".")
## To download all windows binary
> download.packages(tmp, destdir=".", type="win.binary")
If you do it from a Windows machine, you may have to adapt the destdir
argument in those commands.  Also, if you sit behind a proxy, then you
might have to first issue an appropriate
'Sys.putenv("http_proxy"="put your proxy here")'
command.

available.packages() does not seem to have a type argument according
to its documentation, so I guess that even if it is run under Windows
that it returns a list of all source packages available in contrib.
If some of those are not available as a precompiled windows binary,
the download.packages() command will probably fail with an error, so
you have to do the download in bits and pieces, removing offending
entries from `tmp' -- but that should be still faster than downloading
file by file (presumably by clicking in a web browser?).  (The
development version of R should now be more robust (Thanks again,
Brian) when downloading and just continue downloading the remaining
files if it encounters an error.  But I don't know where you run (or
what to run) R-devel ;-) ).

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
                
        Berwin

========================== Full address ===========================Berwin A
Turlach                      Tel.: +61 (8) 6488 3338 (secr)
School of Mathematics and Statistics        +61 (8) 6488 3383 (self)      
The University of Western Australia   FAX : +61 (8) 6488 1028
35 Stirling Highway                   
Crawley WA 6009                e-mail: berwin at maths.uwa.edu.au
Australia                        http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/~berwin

Nam-Ky Nguyen schrieb:
> Dear Rexperts,
> 
> I intend to burn some R CDs to colleagues in Vietnam.  I want to put all
> binary files for base as well as contributed packages (for both Windows
> and Linux). It is very time consuming if I download files by files. Is
> there a place a can buy a CD with all the mentioned files?
> 
> Regards,
There are many methods to download several files at once, either text 
based using an ftp or http client (e.g. wget) or GUI based.

Some GUI's:

- the downTHEMall! plugin for Mozilla Firefox

- "Total Commander" (Shareware, Windows) is a very nice universal file
manager with an effective built-in ftp client.

- KDE on a recent LINUX distribution: the file manager "konqueror" has
built-in http and ftp support and is able to copy complete directory trees.

As an example to copy some documentation simply type

ftp://cran.r-project.org/pub/R/doc

(please select your cran mirror near you) into the address line, then 
select the required directory (e.g. Rnews) and press the right mouse 
button, but be careful if you select huge directory tries.

Thomas P.

Dear Rexpert,

I would like to thank those who spend time  answering my email on the
burning of a CD with all R binary files for Windows and Linux. I have
tried a couple of suggestions but have not been successful. I will pass
these suggestions to our system administrator and I am sure that he can
sort them out.

I hope that the future version of R will be written in Java so that it is
platform independent. This means there will be a single binary file for
each new version of R. At the moment there are files for Windows, Mac OS,
Fedora 1, 2, 3, 4, SUSE 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, etc.

I also hope that the future of version of R include more DOE (Design of
Experiments) modules. R will be more useful if it is not only a language
and environment for statistical computing and graphics, but also for
design of experiments. I am toying with the idea of adding to R some
modules of my Gendex DOE toolkit (http://designcomputing.net/gendex/). I
learn from an Rexpert that the first step for this exercise is to convert
my java code to C++.  As I do not know C++ (and life is short) please let
me know whether there is an alternative way without this conversion and
whether you can actively help me in this exercise.

Regards,
-- 
Nam-Ky Nguyen, Senior Lecturer
School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science
University of New England, Armidale NSW 2351 Australia
nkn at turing.une.edu.au              Tel: +612 6773 2763
http://turing.une.edu.au/~nkn      Fax: +612 6773 3312

Please convert Word files into PDF files before sending them to me.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

Nam-Ky Nguyen wrote:
> Dear Rexpert,
> 
> I would like to thank those who spend time  answering my email on the
> burning of a CD with all R binary files for Windows and Linux. I have
> tried a couple of suggestions but have not been successful. I will pass
> these suggestions to our system administrator and I am sure that he can
> sort them out.
> 
> I hope that the future version of R will be written in Java so that it is
> platform independent. This means there will be a single binary file for
> each new version of R. At the moment there are files for Windows, Mac OS,
> Fedora 1, 2, 3, 4, SUSE 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, etc.
Honestly ......
a) The sources are available and really easy to compile on all those 
operating systems.
b) You do NOT want to do numerical computations on software available in 
Java byte code.
> I also hope that the future of version of R include more DOE (Design of
> Experiments) modules. R will be more useful if it is not only a language
There are some packages availabe with tools for DOE, please check CRAN.
Further contributions from users who like to do DOE (like you!) are 
welocme, of course!

Uwe Ligges


> and environment for statistical computing and graphics, but also for
> design of experiments. I am toying with the idea of adding to R some
> modules of my Gendex DOE toolkit (http://designcomputing.net/gendex/). I
> learn from an Rexpert that the first step for this exercise is to convert
> my java code to C++.  As I do not know C++ (and life is short) please let
> me know whether there is an alternative way without this conversion and
> whether you can actively help me in this exercise.
> 
> Regards,

> a) The sources are available and really easy to compile on all those
> operating systems.
Honestly, I only know how to compile my Java programs. Anyway, we have
been able to work out how to download all files
http://cran.au.r-project.org/. The entire CRAN is 5.4GB. This requires two
DVDs!.
> b) You do NOT want to do numerical computations on software available in
> Java byte code.
You do not want to do heavy numerical computations with R either. Most
statistical calculation using R requires a fraction of a second and I
cannot see a real difference between say 0.05 second and 0.07 second. NKN.