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Power PC with a linux distribution and R

2 messages · Steve Revilak, Wojciech Grzemski

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I have an iBook G4 (1 GHz, 1.25 GB RAM) that's running Debian.
Debian's installer is pretty friendly.  For me, the most difficult
part of the installation was getting 3-button mouse emulation to work
with the iBook's 1-button keypad.  Beyond that, the installation and
setup was easy.

Why did I install Debian on an iBook?  Curiosity more than anything
else.  I've worked with Redhat-based linux distibutions for years, and
I wanted to see what Debian was like.

One thing you might want to keep in mind -- some of Debian's PPC
packages are a little on the old side (for example, R 2.4.0).  That
may or may not be an issue for you.

On Mac OS, you may want to try running R in an X11 xterm (as opposed
to running R.app); that's essentially what you'll see under Linux..

Steve
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On Tuesday, 2008-09-16, Steve Revilak wrote:
I had R installed on a G3 iBook running Gentoo about a year ago
(switched to a different hardware since then ;-)).  And I don't
remember any major issues.  It required some patience to install (in
Gentoo box applications are downloaded as a source code and compiled on
the target machine), but as a plus one would have a rather recent
version of the program... 

I'd recommend it.  Gentoo -- as a system -- may require you to read some
documentation to install and run it at first, but I think it's well worth it.

Best,