[R] R2winBUGS & WinBUGS gui

[Evan Cooch]

>
> No. The idea is to use BRugs, i.e. OpenBUGS in such cases. If OpenBUGS 
> lacks some features, you are certainly welcome to implement them and 
> send patches to Andrew Thomas.
>

Just finished trying the install of openBUGS under linux yet again. Same 
problems (more or less), which I'll list here for the benefit (possibly) 
of others who might go this route.

1. connect to

http://www.mathstat.helsinki.fi/openbugs/

Download latest zip of openBUGS

2. unzip it (preserving directory structure) onto Linux machine (in this 
case, running Fedora Core 8 latest flavours of everything, including R).

3. look at the 'docs' for installing under linux. I say 'docs' 
advisedly, since there really isn't much to read - here it is in its 
entirety.

OpenBUGS for both Windows and Linux can be downloaded as a .zip file 
from here <http://www.mathstat.helsinki.fi/openbugs/OpenBUGS.zip>. The 
source code comes with the installation: check the readme notes to see 
how to compile the code. you will need to install Black Box 
<http://www.oberon.ch/blackbox.html> as well.


      Old Installation Instructions for LinBUGS (which may or may not
      still work):

   1. Un-zip the .zip file into the folder of your choice.
   2. Change the permissions for the LINBUGS and CBugs files (e.g. with
      chmod 755 LinBUGS CBugs)
   3. Change the temp directory in LINBUGS to the current directory (at
      the moment it is "/home/ant/temp"). Use the full path name (can
      anyone suggest a less ugly way of doing this? We don't want to put
      the temp directory in OpenBUGS/).
   4. Start LinBUGS with the command LINBUGS.


(the admonition that it may or may not work is not inspiring). Confirmed 
at step (2), where you're supposed to change permissions on 2 files 
which, in fact, are *not* distributed in the openBUGS.zip file. This 
makes it rather tough to install. ;-)


I dug around, and found some folks have hacked together a LINGUS script 
- one version I found fairly commonly looks like:

#!/bin/bash

export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 

DIR=$(dirname $0)
cd "$DIR"
if [ \! -e "$DIR/temp" ] ; then
	mkdir "$DIR/temp"
fi

if [ -e bugs.so ] ; then
	./cbugs "$DIR" "$DIR/temp" "/bugs.so" 
else
	./cbugs "$DIR" "$DIR/temp" "/brugs.so" 


Fine, except for line two, which doesn't work with newer distros.

And, apparently (based on a bunch of websites I just looked at), BRugs 
doesn't work under Linux, not unless you want to install the Blackbox 
compiler (is there one for Linux?), and recompile. Not me (not today, 
anyway...).

So, unless I (and a lot of folks who seem to be running into the same 
issues), my preliminary conclusion is that neither openBUGS nor BRugs 
are ready for prime time on a Linux platform. Which seems a shame, given 
how many people using MCMC etc. use Linux as their primary platform.

Guess I'll have another look at JAGS.