Hi Folks, Lately I've been testing out recent versions of various Linux distributions, preparatory to choosing which one I want to upgrade to.
One of these is debian 4.0 ("Etch"). I can install R on it as a debian package (it comes through as "R version 2.4.0 Patched (2006-11-25 r39997)". Many of the extra packages are also present as debs, and install and perform without problems. But I've also tried installing some other packages, not available as debs, from sources on CRAN. Here I encounter a show-stopper: "gfortran not found". It turns out that the only reference to "gfortran" available in the list of packages available in the debian repositories is "libgfortran". The full package "gfortran" is not available, so there is no fortran compiler callable as gfortran. On the other hand, I find it is available for Ubuntu (7.04) -- the full gfortran -- and I can successfully compile and install these other packages. Yet Ubuntu is also Debian based (apparently a more recent version, though I can't make out which). I've been to the CRAN section which deals with precompiled Debian binaries: http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/bin/linux/debian/ When I follow the advice: "Simply add something like deb http://<favorite-cran-mirror>/bin/linux/debian stable/ to the file /etc/apt/sources.list on your computer and install as usual." I get an error message that this is "malformed". So I find myself somewhat stuck when trying to use R to the full on the Debian distribution. Since I'm not particularly familiar with the ways of Debian yet, I'm not getting any diagnostic ideas either. But I do get an impression that there's a bit of a mis-match somewhere between R and Debian! Does anyone have any good hints about all this? [BTW, I'm trying these out as guests in virtual machines, using virtualbox, which seems to me to run very well] With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 02-Nov-07 Time: 00:21:44 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ ______________________________________________ R-help@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.