A basic question

I want to know any experience compiling R in other LINUX distributions
besides FEDORA (Red Hat) or Mandrake, for example in BSD, Debian,
Gentoo, Slackware, vector LINUX, Knoppix, Yopper or CERN linux?

Hope this is not a "basic question"

Thank you for your help.

There is considerable experience compiling R under Debian Linux.  Many 
of the developers use Debian and if you check the sources you will find 
that there is a debian directory in the official source distribution. 
The daily package checking is done on a system running Debian and there 
are dozens of R packages in the Debian distribution.  See 
http://packages.qa.debian.org/r/r-base-core for a history of the 
uploads.  The link to the buildd logs shows compilation of R under 
Debian on many different architectures.

Because Knoppix is derived from Debian and uses the Debian packaging 
system the compilation of R under Knoppix is essentially the same as 
under Debian.  The Quantian distribution comes with R installed.

Kenneth <krcabrer at epm.net.co> writes:

Hi R users:

I want to know any experience compiling R in other LINUX distributions
besides FEDORA (Red Hat) or Mandrake, for example in BSD, Debian,
Gentoo, Slackware, vector LINUX, Knoppix, Yopper or CERN linux?

Hope this is not a "basic question"

BSD is not Linux... 

I'm fairly sure we have people checking BSD (perhaps even on the core
team. Ross?), and also SuSE and Gentoo. We definitely have core
members using Debian, and Knoppix is just a Debian variant (see also
Quantian). CERN Linux is a RedHat variant. Don't know about Yoper,
Slackware, and vector Linux (a Slackware derivative), but building
frome source is not generally a problem on Linux.

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Hi R users:

I want to know any experience compiling R in other LINUX distributions
besides FEDORA (Red Hat) or Mandrake, for example in BSD, Debian,
Gentoo, Slackware, vector LINUX, Knoppix, Yopper or CERN linux?

Hope this is not a "basic question"

Thank you for your help.

I assume that the following will typically work:
Get the source file, gunzip and untar, cd to the created directory and
type:

./configure
make
sudo make install

It is best to check the resulting configuration after ./configure and
get the software (compilers, libraries, packages, utilities) you need
for the missing functionality you want to have. It is also wise to run
'make check' after 'make' so that you see if you can trust your
compilation. This make check fails in some cases: at least standard
package 'foreign' failed 'make check' in ppc architecture both in Red
Hat/Fedora  based (Yellowdog) and Debian based (Ubuntu) Linuxes when I
tried last time. Otherwise the compilation seems to run smoothly (and
you may not need 'foreign').

BSD is not Linux, but R is officially supported at least for one version
of BSD with GNU tools: MacOS X.

cheers,jari oksanen

Jari Oksanen <jarioksa at sun3.oulu.fi>