On Fri, 2007-04-20 at 16:02 +0200, ONKELINX, Thierry wrote: > > > > While I am looking for simple and effective solutions that do not > > require installing emacs in our computer lab, the answer "you > > should teach your students emacs/ess on top of R" is perfecly > > acceptable. > > > > TINN-R (http://www.sciviews.org/Tinn-R/) could be an alternative for > Emacs. But hen you would still have to install it on each computer. > > And there still is the build-in code editor.
If you want to avoid a complex setup on multiple computers you might try something we did recently for a customer training class. We used VMware to create a virtual machine. Then we installed all of our software on the virtual machine and set up our training materials for the class on it. Then we rented the necessary computers, installed the free VMware player on them, and copied our virtual machine to each computer. This simplified the class setup significantly and guaranteed that we had a uniform, functioning environment for each of the students. We're a small company, but it should be a great solution for university computer labs. The instructor could set up the environment for his class separately from all other courses, and push it out to the computer lab. A student comes in, opens the virtual machine for his course, and has a clean sandbox to work in. Ideally, it would work like this: The free VMware player is installed on each of the lab computers. The lab manager uses a licensed copy of VMware Workstation to create a clean image of a computer. The instructor makes a copy of the clean image and installs the necessary software and instructional materials. The instructor can use either the free player or the paid workstation version to do this. After the virtual machine is completed, the image is sent back to the lab where it is made available to the lab computers. If you use the paid workstation version rather than the free player version on the lab computers, then you can use the Snapshot feature to create a consistent image for every student. Every time the virtual machine is shutdown, the system can revert back to the snapshot for the next student. It all depends on your budget. How you handle the OS licensing issue for the guest operating system is up to you. I personally would recommend using Linux, but some of our customers are terrified of anything that doesn't look like a Microsoft OS. The only caveat is the disk space utilization. Having a complete OS image for every student for every class could eat up terabytes of space. But heck, terabyte RAID arrays are readily available these days. Fred -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred Bacon Phone: 978 663-9500 x 273 Aerodyne Research, Inc. FAX: 978 663-4918 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? -- Henry Ward Beecher ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.