Installing LaTeX and R - please help me

Hi,

I've just got an Acer Aspire One and am quite new to Linux. I've USED Unix systems before, but I've never had to install anything. I was wondering if anyone had any experience installing a LaTeX editor on the Acer Aspire One?

Also, seems unlikely that anyone would know this, but has anyone ever installed the statistical programming language "R" on this machine? I could use some tips...

Thirdly, how easy/difficult would it be to install Ubuntu on this machine? Will it break things like the webcam etc? Are there many tweaks you have to do to get things to work properly? And is it worth it ( ) ? I've looked around on the internet, and it seems a lot of people don't really like Linpus Lite..

Thanks in advance for your help,

Alfy

 

Assuming you have configured the repositories correctly:

Code:

sudo yum install latex

will get you LaTeX and the dependencies. Lyx will probably also pull LaTeX in if you prefer that interface. You can also find LaTeX and family in the add/remove software tool - which may or may not also contain the programminglanguage you want. It did contain variations of Haskell, Fortran etc - so you may be in luck

Do note that Linpus Linux as included on the old Aspire ones (8.9 inch screen, 8 gb SSD) is based on Fedora 8, an old linux distribution which is no longer supported or updated by the Fedora community (Fedora itself is at release 12 now). One can compare it with using windows 98.

Installing Ubuntu, especially the Netbook remix, is pretty easy. A few small tweaks are needed to make the card readers hot swappable, those are detailed on the Ubuntu subfora of this very forum The wireless works, but slightly less well than under Linpus. Battery life is reduced, boot time is increased. When installing, I suggest telling the partitioner to use the ext2 instead of the ext4 file system if you are using a SSD. Ext4 by default uses journalling, which will reduce the performance reduce the liftime of an SSD. It can be disabled, but that is nontrivial - and ext4 itself may not be entirely reliable.