[R] Help with Matrix package

[rob foxall (IFR)]

Hello all,
	A colleague at work set me the challenge to convert some MATLAB
code into R, to see which is faster. We'd seen that benchmark comparing
MATLAB 6.5 to R1.90 (and others), and so I thought that I should be able
to get roughly comparable speeds. The code has lots of multiplications
of matrixes, transposes, and MATLAB's "repmat". I did the code
conversion, and R was about 6 times slower, so I had a closer look at
the benchmark comparison and it seems that I should be using the
"Matrix" package.
	Is there any dummies-level help available for this package? I am
struggling even to apply simple functions such as "sum" and "mean" to
matrixes constructed from this class (not that I need to yet), and more
importantly "kronecker", to convert from "repmat". (The help for
"kronecker" from the Matrix package doesn't seem to mention kronecker,
so I am a bit stuck). Any guidance greatly accepted -- I have read the
overview, looked through the various Matrix-listed functions, and
unsuccessfully tried searching R-help.

Using R version 2.2.0, windows xp.

Cheers,
	Rob.