I have been compiling R from source tar balls on Ubuntu for many years and like the way Ubuntu manges dependency.
Best, Shige On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org> wrote: > > On 8 February 2009 at 17:27, Stavros Macrakis wrote: > | The R FAQ is very helpful about installing R on various Linuxes, but > doesn't > | seem to discuss the advantages of one distribution over another. I am > new > | to Linux (though not to Unix!), and would appreciate some guidance from > | those with experience. > | > | I plan to set up a headless Linux x86 server for the sole purpose of > running > | 64-bit R. Are there reasons to prefer some Linux distributions over > others? > | I have no preference between binary and source distributions of R, as > along > | as they are complete, up-to-date, easy to install, and easy to update. > | > | I would be accessing the server through my Windows desktop using > Emacs/ESS. > | What is the recommended way to display plots on the desktop? An X server? > A > | display Postscript server? Something else? > | > | My data come out of a DBMS; do some Linux distributions have better ODBC > | drivers than others? > > Good question, and while it in general may depend on your preferences and > tastes, there are some things that make the Ubuntu amd64 _server_ flavour > appealing for your situation: > > - it is meant for servers, so no extra desktop apps or processes > > - Ubuntu amd64 has support via CRAN's binary set of R packages, ie you get > a pre-built R 2.8.1 without any extra work > > - additional goodies such as ESS, littler, ... available via CRAN as well > in updated packages > > - you still have the usual 20,000+ Ubuntu packages, including iodbc and > unixodbc and number of related packages: > e...@joe:~$ apt-cache search odbc| wc -l > 101 > e...@joe:~$ > > It so happens that I just installed another compute server at work on > Friday. > I had a cdrom handy with Ubuntu 8.04 for amd64/server -- the install was > done > in a few minutes, as was the on-line upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10. All in under > 300 packages were installed as I chose a lean default. You can probably > achieve the same using Debian's install cdroms. Your mileage may vary but a > number of us have been happy with this. And to connect, I use Cygwin's x11 > server which got updated recently and have no issues. > > Hth, Dirk > > -- > Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions. > > ______________________________________________ > 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. > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.
