odbcConnectExcel on non-Windows?

|       What should I do regarding code to write an Excel file in a 
| non-Windows platform? 
[...]
|       What would you suggest we do about this? 
[...] 
|       If there is a better way to handle this, I would like to know. 

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/WriteXLS/index.html

Portable (in the sense of used by Perl, Python, ... or other scripting
engines) solutions have existed for a dozen years.  We have a wrapper to Perl
code for a long time too (having been of the initial discussions that lead to
Greg's initial read.xls from the gdata package).

Dirk

Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.