Hi, I'm looking to move from Windows into a 64-bit Linux environment. Which is the best Linux Flavor to use within R? To install R on this environment, do I need to do any compiling? Thanks all! Axel. [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
I am up and running on ubuntu. I have not had to compile anything, but If I did apt-get build-dep r-base and everything would work fine. Maybe I am understating this. You can add some repositories that are not the main ones to always have an up to date R on your system. hth, Stephen On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 5:04 PM, Axel Urbiz <axel.urbiz at gmail.com> wrote:> Hi, > > I'm looking to move from Windows into a 64-bit Linux environment. Which is > the best Linux Flavor to use within R? To install R on this environment, do > I need to do any compiling? > > Thanks all! > > Axel. > > ? ? ? ?[[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >-- Stephen Sefick Let's not spend our time and resources thinking about things that are so little or so large that all they really do for us is puff us up and make us feel like gods. We are mammals, and have not exhausted the annoying little problems of being mammals. -K. Mullis
Dne Ne 14. b?ezna 2010 23:04:02 Axel Urbiz napsal(a):> Hi, > > I'm looking to move from Windows into a 64-bit Linux environment. Which is > the best Linux Flavor to use within R? To install R on this environment, do > I need to do any compiling?IMHO distributions like Ubuntu, openSUSE or Mandriva are very good for beginners. There are R packages and everything You need. Do not forget to install Rkward - comfortable GUI for R. You do not need any compiling unless You wish to play with it. :-) Best regards, Vojt?ch> Thanks all! > > Axel. > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, > minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.-- Vojt?ch Zeisek Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu / Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux http://www.opensuse.org/ http://web.natur.cuni.cz/~zeisek/ ------------- dal?? ??st --------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: [??dn? popis nen? k dispozici] Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 198 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/attachments/20100314/04e78fbb/attachment.bin>
On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Axel Urbiz <axel.urbiz at gmail.com> wrote:> Hi, > > I'm looking to move from Windows into a 64-bit Linux environment. Which is > the best Linux Flavor to use within R? To install R on this environment, do > I need to do any compiling? > > Thanks all! > > Axel. >Do NOT pick your Linux environment based on the ease of running R. Pick one that you feel you can administer comfortably. Once you're far enough along for that to run then R will likely be pretty easy on any of them. I run Gentoo. It's probably not the right distro for most Linux newbies although most of us that run it will gladly tell you why. Installing R from source was one command emerge R A better environment for a Linux-newbie would likely be Ubuntu or possibly Arch. Both are very capable with Ubuntu being the one with lots of users and forums for you to ask your questions. Hope that helps, Mark
Just to make this thoroughly confusing, I will say that I am very happy with Fedora, which is the bleeding-edge version of RedHat, which I used starting around 1996. Tom "Spot" Callaway pays close attention to the R RPM, and several of the R packages are also available as RPMs (but I don't use those, because I just use R itself to install and update packages). When I have some problem with Fedora, I usually Google for it and find useful discussion of it in the Ubuntu (etc.) mailing lists. In other words, the problems are with the programs themselves, not the distributions. I use Fedora on both 64 and 32 bit systems. Jon -- Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
On Sun, 14 Mar 2010, Jonathan Baron wrote: > Just to make this thoroughly confusing, > I will say that I am very happy with Fedora I can second that, as I have found Fedora (and before that, RedHat) plus KDE to create less response interference for those of us who use Windows. Not by choice, but in almost every position I have held recently, I was the sole person who dual-booted to Linux. I've yet to find an application that I can't install on Fedora, but I have had to admit defeat on a PC with Ubuntu in a lab where I collaborate. Jim
Axel Urbiz wrote:> Hi, > > I'm looking to move from Windows into a 64-bit Linux environment. Which is > the best Linux Flavor to use within R? To install R on this environment, do > I need to do any compiling? > > Thanks all! > > Axel. >You have received a number of useful replies. I will add my 2 cents as well. First, make sure the distribution you choose does have a 64 bit version, since that is what you are looking for. That said, allow me to share my Linux philosophy. There are many distributions out there, each with their pluses and minuses. For example, I used SuSE and OpenSuSE for awhile. It was good in that things worked "out of the box," and it has (had?) a good sysadmin tool. The problem was, if I needed to compile stuff, the tools for development were not included in the default install, so I had to search for them (a full install may have fixed this, but the full install was really bloated). Most of the popular distributions come with some kind of sysadmin tool. This is a useful thing for someone totally new to Linux. It can be frustrating if you decide on a new distribution, since the sysadmin stuff will look different. I eventually moved away from OpenSuSE because the life cycle of supported versions was quite short. I don't like being forced to re-install a new OS just to get the latest patches. So, I moved to Slackware (they have a 64 bit version now BTW). I love it, but it's not for everybody. The biggest obstacle to most people is that it has no sysadmin tool. It is your responsibility to edit the config files in a text editor, if you want to fine-tune or customize things. It is your responsibility to do dependency checking when installing packages (this is a plus in that when you install something and something breaks, you know what to blame). This means you need to invest some time and learn a little more Linux than other distributions forces you to learn. The full install is not bloated and comes with all the development tools needed. I always compile R from source and it is easy. ./configure make su make install In closing (congratulations if you've read this far), there is probably not a wrong choice of Linux to run R on. Choose a flavour of Linux that you like. Many distributions have Live versions. These are versions that boot and run from your DVD drive. It's a good way to get a feeling for a particular distribution without installing anything. -- Kevin E. Thorpe Biostatistician/Trialist, Knowledge Translation Program Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health University of Toronto email: kevin.thorpe at utoronto.ca Tel: 416.864.5776 Fax: 416.864.3016
Le dimanche 14 mars 2010 ? 18:04 -0400, Axel Urbiz a ?crit :> Hi, > > I'm looking to move from Windows into a 64-bit Linux environment. Which is > the best Linux Flavor to use within R? To install R on this environment, do > I need to do any compiling?I'd like to add two cents of folly to the (wise) advice you've received already. Indeed , Ubuntu is one very good distribution whose management system has made the care and feeding of a Linux system a *lot* easier for the not-so-system-oriented people like yours truly. Whereas my first contacts with a Unix-like system were about 30 years ago (Oh my, how time flies, and how far away are Xenix and our 68000 systems ...), I'm *still* not fond of system maintenance for it's own sake. Ubuntu added an (almost) fool-proof maintenance system to an excellent distribution called Debian, thus lowering the Linux entry bar to as low as it can be humanely made. Some pretended that "Ubuntu" was a code word for "I'm too stupid to configure Debian" ; quite untrue ! It only means "I'm too busy|lazy to configure Debian", which is a Good Thing (TM). But Debian has its strong points, and one of them is *extremely* strong for an R user : Dirk Eddelbuettel (whose name I'm almost surely misspelling (sorry, Dirk !)) has created a marvelous system called cran2deb which routinely creates binary Debian packages from (almost) the 2000+ R packages available nowadays. That might look small change : the basic tools used for developing/compiling most R packages are small beer (at least by today's standards).But some of them might depend on fiendishly difficult-to-maintain foreign libraries. Dirk's cran2deb takes care of that and creates any information that Debian's dpkg maintenance system needs to automate *your* R maintenance chores by integrating them in Debian's maintenance scheme, which is as automatic as you can get without becoming an incomprehensible beast. In fact, cran2deb is so good that Im seriously tempted to go back to Debian (after almost 8 years of Debian use, Ubuntu's ease-of-use, easy access to no-so-exotic hardware drivers (and the then-incessant politically correct yack-yacking on some Debian mailing lists...) made me switch to an early Ubuntu distribution). I did not yet switch back (mostly for not-so-"superficial" hardware support reasons), but I maintain a backup Debian installation "for the hell of it" and to test waters. So far, they have been a lot less rough than they used to be, but there are still occasional rows (e. g. a recent gotcha with openoffice.org, which would have render myself unable to work with those d*mn Word files for about a month, or forced me to do a maual repair (which I hate...)). So consider Debian as a (desirable) alternative to Ubuntu. HTH, Emmanuel Charpentier, DDS, MSc <affiliation withdrawn, notwithstanding Frank Harrell's whims...>