Tom Moertel writes,
I wanted to let you know that I have packaged the CRAN “arm” package and its prerequisite R packages for Fedora Linux, making it easy to install using Fedora’s integrated package-management system. Normally, installing “arm” is somewhat tricky because of the dependency upon on R2WinBUGS, which requires BRugs, which doesn’t currently build on Linux. (I got around this problem by making R2WinBUGS not require BRugs, which is the best work-around I could come up with. The resulting functionality is therefore incomplete, but at least Linux users get the functionality that is possible on their platform rather than a failed installation.)
I don’t know how many of your students or readers use Fedora Linux, but if any do, feel free to point them to my packages: http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2007/04/25/new-fedora-core-rpms-for-cran-packages
Just a warning: we’ve been updating “arm” occasionally, mostly improvements to bayesglm() and fixing the calls to lmer().
For what it's worth, I successfully installed "arm" on two different machines running Ubuntu and Opensuse from inside R, i.e. using install.packages("arm"). The recent versions of R (2.5.0+ I believe) download prerequisites from CRAN automatically (depending on your R configuration, one might have to be running R as root for packages to build successfully). I did run into some dependency problems when trying to install "arm" in R 2.4 though.
I had tried linux last month and did not like it. i think it is not so user friendly for newbies without any basic knowledge.
I agree. It is not easy for newbies.
Takes time to get the hang of it.
Once you've mastered it though it's a lot more powerful than windows, these days it's quite user friendly too!