"Nathan Leon Pace, MD, MStat" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
