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.
