I have recently acquired an Asus EEE PC which runs a version of Xandros which I believe to be a fork of Debian. I have been using R under various versions of Windows for some years but this is my first move into the world of Unix. I have installed Texlive from a CD and I have successfully added a UK-based repository and installed Texmaker. Now I would like to add R. There are dire warnings on the EEE forums about the dangers of using Debian repositories so I would like some more advice before I download things.
1 - If I download from the Debian repository using stable (which is the distribution I have - etch) will I get old versions of R? I do not understand what stable means here, is it like being frozen at some point in time? Do I need to using testing, and if so is that likely to have compatibility problems with my system? 2 - If I download from my favourite CRAN (Bristol, UK) it seems I do not get all the contributed packages. Is that correct? If so I do not quite see the point so I suspect I misunderstand here. 3 - As a last resort I should install from sources but a poster to R-help suggested he had had problems with this. Where do I find what versions of compilers and so on I need to build from source? I know I should just try it and see but I am reluctant to do that because of the dire warnings about damaging the system by using non-Xandros repositories. I also do not yet know how to un-install things either. For the record I am using the command line and apt-get and I have enabled pinning to give the EEE repositories highest priority. Michael Dewey http://www.aghmed.fsnet.co.uk _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Debian mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian
