For those reading this thread who might be thinking of trying Linux, I would like to point out that, with Fedora (another distribution of Linux aside from Ubuntu), the repositories are up to date, and there seems to be someone connected with Fedora (as well as the R core team) who is interested in keeping them that way.
[Others should stop reading now. This is just for those considering Fedora.] There are several ways to install programs in the form of "rpm"s. (Originally stood for "Red Hat Package Manager.") Perhaps the simplest is, as root: yum install R This gets you a lot of additional rpm's ("dependencies") if you don't have them. Fedora also maintains rpm's of various R packages, a seemingly random selection of them, but you don't need to depend on Fedora for those. Once R is installed, you can invoke R as root and then say, for example, from the prompt: >install.packages("lmer") If you want to install ess and xemacs, I think all you need to say is yum install xemacs-ess-el which will install, as dependencies, everything else you need, including xemacs if you don't have it. Although Ubuntu is recommended for Linux newbies, it may be the case that Fedora is a little easier, at least about this. Warning: Fedora is pure about open-source licenses, which means that many closed-source programs that you might want, like Adobe Flash, Skype, and some drivers, won't be there unless you get them yourself (and you can do that). Jon -- Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron ______________________________________________ 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.