ESS was installed in our faculties' UNIX-net by our system administrator. At the moment, we have only R installed to be used with ESS, no other statistical software. I understand the "How to start ESS"-part as follows: I simply have to start emacs and then I can start an S-session with M-x S. This gives "no match", which is not very surprising, because S is not installed. But M-x R does as well give "no match".
Well, maybe it is a silly suggestion, but probably your sysadmin didn't edit the .emacs file in your ~/ directory by adding the line (load "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/ESS/lisp/ess-site.elc") - which is what I have - or whatever the line for your system would be (if I remember it is different for emacs - I use xemacs - and of course the path would change). It is explained in the ESS README file found in the tar.gz package.
Michele Alzetta -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._