REvolution R coming to Ubuntu

REvolution Computing’s enhanced distribution of R, REvolution R, has been available for free download from our website for Windows and MacOS for over a year now, and has been used by thousands of R users for high-performance statistical data analysis. Soon, we’ll be expanding our free distributions to Ubuntu Linux, with the release of REvolution R 3.0.

Like the Windows and MacOS versions, REvolution R 3.0 for Ubuntu Linux includes performance enhancements that make common mathematical operations (like matrix multiplication and decomposition) faster than in regular R. These optimized math libraries are also multi-threaded, so if you’re using a multi-CPU or multi-core workstation or laptop, REvolution R will use all available CPUs for many mathematical operations.

REvolution R 3.0 also features new parallel programming tools for R, so you can write loops in R which run faster by using multiple CPUs simultaneously. The new “foreach” function acts as a replacement for the “for” loop and function like “lapply”, while the “doMC” function enabled multiple iterations of the loop to run simultaneously. 

More Read

It’s not East Coast vs West Coast, it’s about making more places like the Valley

Pentagon Implements New Cyber Security Guidelines for Cloud Vendors

The Non-Fault in iCloud: Why You Shouldn’t Shut Down Your Account

Maybe you’re just not that into your data?

Synchronize Your Brains with (Data) Storytelling

REvolution R 3.0 is 100% compatible with the most recent version of R (R 2.9.2), so all the scripts and packages you currently use with R will produce exactly the same results in REvolution R 3.0 (although they may take less time to run).

When the new 9.10 release of Ubuntu Linux (codenamed “Karmic Koala”) is released on October 29, REvolution R will be immediately available as a download from the Ubuntu repositories. (If you’re already using the Karmic beta release, it’s available right now.) You can install REvolution R for Ubuntu by entering the following command:

sudo apt-get install revolution-r

If you already have R installed in Ubuntu (or only install the r-base-core package), when you upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 you’ll see the following message when starting R:

REvolution R enhancements not installed.  For improved
performance and other extensions: apt-get install revolution-r

[Some technical information for Ubuntu junkies: the “revolution-r” package builds on the “r-base-core” package so that they can both share other R-related package dependencies (like all the CRAN packages), which saves time for the volunteer maintainers of the upstream packages. Other than the message above, the r-base-core package is otherwise unmodified in 9.10, and if you wish you can suppress that message by modifying the Rprofile.site file.]

We’re very excited to be expanding the supported platforms of REvolution R to Ubuntu Linux, and we hope that the performance improvements and parallel computing tools make R even better for many users. Thanks go to our friends at Canonical for helping us introduce REvolution R to Ubuntu, and special thanks go to Debian developer and R contributor Dirk Eddelbuettel for invaluable technical assistance in creating and submitting the REvolution R packages for Ubuntu.

By the way, if you have any questions about using any of the REvolution R distributions, don’t forget you can always ask questions in our REvolution R forums where other REvolution R users and our technical staff are ready to help.