R on netbooks et al?

Hi,

For what it's worth, it's a trivial operation to replace the on-board
1Gb with a 2Gb module, which doesn't cost too much. Okay, being a bit
demanding I also replaced the hard-disk with a 320 Gb one to harbour a
dual boot ubuntu-eee / windows XP. But that does give a machine which
is a worthy replacement of the once state-of-the art Acer Travelmate
800 I used to have. I happily run R and even virtual machines using
VMWare. Truth be told, it being a netbook, you may want to rely on and
connect to external computational resources for the real heavy stuff.

Cheers,

Tsjerk

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:20 PM, Ted Harding
<Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

On 08-Mar-09 17:44:18, Douglas Bates wrote:

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 7:08 AM, Michael Dewey <info at aghmed.fsnet.co.uk>
wrote:

At 08:47 05/03/2009, herrdittmann at yahoo.co.uk wrote:

Dear useRs,
With the rise of netbooks and 'lifestyle laptops" I am tempted
to get one of these to mainly run R on it. Processor power and
hard disk space seem to be ok. What I wonder is the handling and
feel with respect to R.

Has anyone here installed or is running R on one of these, and
if so, what is your experience? Would it be more of a nice looking
gadget than a feasable platform to do some stats on?

One issue is whether you wish to use Linux or Windows. If you do
use Linux I would advise picking a netbook with one of the standard
distributions. The early EEE PC had Xandros and dire warnings about
using the Debian repositiories. In fact I had no problem despite a
total lack of experience although I am not sure what will happy with
the recent move to lenny.

Because I have used Debian Linux and Debian-based distributions
like Ubuntu for many years, I installed a eee-specific version of
Ubuntu within a day or two of getting an ASUS eee pc1000. There are
currently at least two versions of Ubuntu, "easy peasy" and eeebuntu,
that are specific to the eee pc models.  I started with "easy peasy"
at the time it was called something else (Ubuntu eee?) and later
switched to eeebuntu. In both cases packages for the latest versions
of R from the Ubuntu package repository on CRAN worked flawlessly.

I find the netbook to be very convenient.  Having a 5 hour battery
life and a weight of less than 3 pounds is wonderful. I teach all of
my classes with it and even use it at home (attached to a monitor,
USB keyboard and mouse and an external hard drive) in lieu of a
desktop computer. (I have been eyeing the "eee box" covetously
but have not yet convinced myself that I really need yet another
computer). I develop R packages on it and don't really notice that
it is "under-powered" by today's standards. Of course, when I
started computing and even when I started working with the S
language the memory capacity of computers was measured in kilobytes
so the thought of "only" 1Gb of memory doesn't cause me to shriek
in horror.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, Doug. Given that devices like
the EeePC are marketed in terms of "less demanding" users, it's good
to know what it is like for a "hard user". Further related comments
would be welcome!

I have to agree about the RAM issue too. My once-trusty old Sharp
MZ-80B CP/M machine (early 1980s), with its 64KB and occupying
a good 0.25 m^3 of physical space, would have to be replicated
2^14 = 16384 times over to give the same RAM (and occupy some
400 m^3 of space, say 7.4m x 7.4m x 7.4m, or about the size of
my house). Now I have things on my desk, about the size of my
thumb, with 8MB in each.

Ted.

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Date: 08-Mar-09                                       Time: 18:20:45
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