Le dimanche 14 mars 2010 à 18:04 -0400, Axel Urbiz a écrit : > 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...> ______________________________________________ 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.