Hi, For what it's worth, it's a trivial operation to replace the on-board 1Gb with a 2Gb module, which doesn't cost too much. Okay, being a bit demanding I also replaced the hard-disk with a 320 Gb one to harbour a dual boot ubuntu-eee / windows XP. But that does give a machine which is a worthy replacement of the once state-of-the art Acer Travelmate 800 I used to have. I happily run R and even virtual machines using VMWare. Truth be told, it being a netbook, you may want to rely on and connect to external computational resources for the real heavy stuff.
Cheers, Tsjerk On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:20 PM, Ted Harding <ted.hard...@manchester.ac.uk> wrote: > On 08-Mar-09 17:44:18, Douglas Bates wrote: >> On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:08 AM, Michael Dewey <i...@aghmed.fsnet.co.uk> >> wrote: >>> At 08:47 05/03/2009, herrdittm...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: >>>> Dear useRs, >>>> With the rise of netbooks and 'lifestyle laptops" I am tempted >>>> to get one of these to mainly run R on it. Processor power and >>>> hard disk space seem to be ok. What I wonder is the handling and >>>> feel with respect to R. >>>> >>>> Has anyone here installed or is running R on one of these, and >>>> if so, what is your experience? Would it be more of a nice looking >>>> gadget than a feasable platform to do some stats on? >>> >>> One issue is whether you wish to use Linux or Windows. If you do >>> use Linux I would advise picking a netbook with one of the standard >>> distributions. The early EEE PC had Xandros and dire warnings about >>> using the Debian repositiories. In fact I had no problem despite a >>> total lack of experience although I am not sure what will happy with >>> the recent move to lenny. >> >> Because I have used Debian Linux and Debian-based distributions >> like Ubuntu for many years, I installed a eee-specific version of >> Ubuntu within a day or two of getting an ASUS eee pc1000. There are >> currently at least two versions of Ubuntu, "easy peasy" and eeebuntu, >> that are specific to the eee pc models. I started with "easy peasy" >> at the time it was called something else (Ubuntu eee?) and later >> switched to eeebuntu. In both cases packages for the latest versions >> of R from the Ubuntu package repository on CRAN worked flawlessly. >> >> I find the netbook to be very convenient. Having a 5 hour battery >> life and a weight of less than 3 pounds is wonderful. I teach all of >> my classes with it and even use it at home (attached to a monitor, >> USB keyboard and mouse and an external hard drive) in lieu of a >> desktop computer. (I have been eyeing the "eee box" covetously >> but have not yet convinced myself that I really need yet another >> computer). I develop R packages on it and don't really notice that >> it is "under-powered" by today's standards. Of course, when I >> started computing and even when I started working with the S >> language the memory capacity of computers was measured in kilobytes >> so the thought of "only" 1Gb of memory doesn't cause me to shriek >> in horror. > > Thanks for sharing your experiences, Doug. Given that devices like > the EeePC are marketed in terms of "less demanding" users, it's good > to know what it is like for a "hard user". Further related comments > would be welcome! > > I have to agree about the RAM issue too. My once-trusty old Sharp > MZ-80B CP/M machine (early 1980s), with its 64KB and occupying > a good 0.25 m^3 of physical space, would have to be replicated > 2^14 = 16384 times over to give the same RAM (and occupy some > 400 m^3 of space, say 7.4m x 7.4m x 7.4m, or about the size of > my house). Now I have things on my desk, about the size of my > thumb, with 8MB in each. > > Ted. > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.hard...@manchester.ac.uk> > Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 > Date: 08-Mar-09 Time: 18:20:45 > ------------------------------ 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. > -- Tsjerk A. Wassenaar, Ph.D. Junior UD (post-doc) Biomolecular NMR, Bijvoet Center Utrecht University Padualaan 8 3584 CH Utrecht The Netherlands P: +31-30-2539931 F: +31-30-2537623 ______________________________________________ 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.