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. ______________________________________________ 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.
