[R] how-to: installing R on Knoppix

Dirk Eddelbuettel
Sun, 05 Mar 2006 14:37:39 -0000

Hi Charles,

Nice iniative for Linux newbie :) Some of us may have done a few things
differently. I'll just point out one or two below. If you want to continue
this discussion, why don't we carry it over to the r-sig-debian list that is
more appropriate?  I'll set the reply-to header accordingly.

On 5 March 2006 at 03:47, charles loboz wrote:
| On my uSB drive I had a package downloaded from CRAN,
| debian distribution (Knoppix is 'related' to Debian so
| I assumed there will be less problems when using
| Debian's packages - I did not try rpms).
| As per my mount point I tried to install it as
|        dpkg -i
| /mnt/usbhd/r-base-core_2.1.1-0woody1_i386.deb

Well, 2.1.1. is one release behind -- and we even offer you the current one,
i.e. R 2.2.1, as a backport as is explained in the R FAQ itself (with thanks to
Christian for building the backport of my Debian R packages).

And in this particular case, I think you could also have installed R 2.2.1
straight from Debian testing as well as the Knoppix 4.0.2 libraries should be
current.

| which, naturally, resulted in multiple dependency
| errors, because many of the libraries were missing.
| After some trial  and error I found that following

Now that is a feasible strategy, but unfortunately the most laborious one.
Debian has truly excellent package management and dependency resolution: the
apt-get program is designed to do just that for you. You said you're new at
Linux --- but I think you will find time spend on reading the documentation [
you'll have to google for suitable intros ] to be a most excellent
investment.

| Observations: 128mb memory is not sufficient - KDE
| uses much more. Most likely for a computer like that
| much better approach would be to use Damn Small Linux
| - a 50mb distribution, descending from  Knoppix I did

Gabor and I had some off-line chats a few weeks back and he had success with
Damn Small Linux running _in parallel_ to his Windows installation using
coLinux.  I like running Quantian [ my Knoppix derivative that adds a few gb
of software to Knoppix, see dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian ] using VMware
Player running alongside my normal Linux (home) -- or Windows (work) --
workstation.  In either case, more memory is always better and 128mb is good
for very few things these days.

| installation of R would be trouble-free. This was an
| attempt to revitalize and old and tired computer.

A time-honoured approach for that is to take an older release of whichever
distro you favour as it will be lighter on resource consumption. You are
being a tad inconsistent here as you seem to like the newest KDE eye candy [
and I understand, I do too :) ] which unfortunately requires more resources
in terms for ram and disk space -- so it's a trade-off.

Cheers, Dirk

--
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison