[R] R and Debian Linux

[(Ted Harding)]

Hi Folks,
Lately I've been testing out recent versions of various
Linux distributions, preparatory to choosing which one
I want to upgrade to.

One of these is debian 4.0 ("Etch").

I can install R on it as a debian package (it comes
through as "R version 2.4.0 Patched (2006-11-25 r39997)".

Many of the extra packages are also present as debs,
and install and perform without problems.

But I've also tried installing some other packages,
not available as debs, from sources on CRAN.

Here I encounter a show-stopper: "gfortran not found".
It turns out that the only reference to "gfortran"
available in the list of packages available in the
debian repositories is "libgfortran". The full
package "gfortran" is not available, so there is
no fortran compiler callable as gfortran.

On the other hand, I find it is available for Ubuntu
(7.04) -- the full gfortran -- and I can successfully
compile and install these other packages. Yet Ubuntu
is also Debian based (apparently a more recent version,
though I can't make out which).

I've been to the CRAN section which deals with precompiled
Debian binaries:

 http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/bin/linux/debian/

When I follow the advice:

  "Simply add something like

 deb http://<favorite-cran-mirror>/bin/linux/debian stable/

  to the file /etc/apt/sources.list on your computer and
  install as usual."

I get an error message that this is "malformed". So I find
myself somewhat stuck when trying to use R to the full on
the Debian distribution. Since I'm not particularly familiar
with the ways of Debian yet, I'm not getting any diagnostic
ideas either. But I do get an impression that there's a bit
of a mis-match somewhere between R and Debian!

Does anyone have any good hints about all this?

[BTW, I'm trying these out as guests in virtual machines,
using virtualbox, which seems to me to run very well]

With thanks,
Ted.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 02-Nov-07                                       Time: 00:21:44
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------