[R] R for various ports of linux

[Douglas Bates]

"Nathan Leon Pace, MD, MStat" <nlpace at remi.med.utah.edu> writes:

> I currently download the R binaries for Redhat 7.x Linux.
> 
> There is considerable turmoil in the vendors of Linux. Redhat
> apparently is changing it's business model to paid versions.
> 
> 
> This might motivate my department to use a different vendor of Linux.
> 
> Is there anything predictable about which vendors/versions of Linux
> will have R binaries in the future?

Debian, and hence Knoppix, will continue to have R binaries.  

For those who are considering switching Linux distributions I would
strongly recommend looking at Knoppix 3.3
(http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/ although for the next few weeks you
will need to click through to
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-old-en.html ) and Dirk
Eddelbuettel's Quantian (http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian/) which
is based on Knoppix and contains the binaries of all R and Octave
packages as part of the distribution.  Dirk maintains the Debian
packages of R and Octave packages and usually has binary Debian
packages uploaded within a day of a new R release.  (Well technically
Dirk and I are co-maintainers of the R packages for Debian but in
practice it is about 92% Dirk and 8% Doug doing the maintaining.)

If you have never used Knoppix or Quantian you find it astonishing
when you first try it out.  You download one CD-ROM image, burn it
onto a CD and boot from the CD.  Next thing you know you have a
working system.

Dirk presented a paper on Quantian at DSC-2003.  See

http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/DSC-2003/Proceedings/Eddelbuettel.pdf