Ubuntu 11.04 Beta my first look

I finally installed Ubuntu 11.04 Beta. The install went well using VirtualBox. Then lots of updates as expected for a Beta and I was up and running.
Lets cut to the chase - Unity instead of Gnome. This is going to be love/hate for different people and I hate it. My first impression of how it looked was very positive. The idea behind it, even seemed positive, but I won't upgrade to 11.04 at any point in the near future with Unity. I have to recognize that Unity is different and sometimes we don't like things because they are different.

What didn't I like about Unity and the desktop environment? First it simply takes longer to find simple applications. The easiest way seems to be to search for them by name. If I wanted to do that I would just launch everything from terminal. Terminal, BTW not on the unity launcher. Who is using this thing, its Linux after all, where is the quick launch for terminal. So I get my icons already in the Unity launcher, but there are nothing that I would use. Firefox and LibreOffice are nice, but I don't use them all that much. Customizing Unity is sort of a pain. Its not like any quick launcher you have used before. It was easy to remove LibreOffice from the laucher, just right click and uncheck "keep in Launcher". What about adding stuff. This took a little bit to figure out but simple enough, launch the program you want, probably by searching for it, and the right click it and check "keep in launcher". I personally don't like this method. I'd rather just load a tool to customize the launcher and put what I want in it. Oh and then be able to reorder the list as I wanted. With Unity this feature has still eluded me. What's the big deal anyway? Well its sort of annoying and Gnome isn't that annoying. In fact Gnome lets you customize a lot more so far as I can tell.
Then it has bugs as you would expect. I ran Chrome, somehow the top of the window jumped off the screen. In Gnome you would right click the window toolbar icon and select move to get it back. Unity didn't seem to have this feature.
There desktop also didn't have an obvious or easy way to add applets like in Gnome. I right click the top toolbar but I get nothing. In Gnome I have my weather on the toolbar and my activity monitor. There must be some answer for that, but it wasn't obvious. I also didn't have multiple desktops by default. That seemed odd too. If they were easy to add I couldn't find it.
The look and feel customization, is also weak. From screenshots around the web, it looks possible, but I don't know how long that would take to figure out.
It was surprisingly stable for a Beta, but I had several crashes with different applications, from Unity itself, to Banshee and other applications. That wasn't the worst part of the experience.
After my Unity experience, I logged out and logged back in, using the Ubuntu Classic. This seemed to work as I expected. To me I wasn't ready for the switch to Unity, but the easy option to use 'Classic', I was very happy with Ubuntu 11.04. My only concern about upgrading is about what will happen to my current desktop and its options already in place. I have it working the way I want right now. There really isn't anything, I'm dying to have in a new OS. Ubuntu 10.4 is really a great operating system. Stable, fast and easily customized, I'm not sure there is a good reason yet to try something new.
If you know something in 11.04 you are dying to try out let me know, so I can give it a look. I'm waiting for the excuse to upgrade.

Ubuntu with RStudio - Upgrading to R 2.13.0

Its been a while since I posted. Mostly because there are no readers :)
(BTW - I still have my iPhone. iOS4 is pretty darn good, not sure about that AT&T)

I run Ubuntu 10.4 still. I have a VM with 11.04 on it for testing purposes, but I'm not ready to leave 10.4. However there are new versions R and RStudio available. I checked the Ubuntu repositories, but they were stuck on R2.10. I considered the OS upgrades, even to 11.04, but that had R 2.12 which meant I was going to have to upgrade something anyway. I considered not upgrading but my current version of R was having some issues. The biggest issue for me was that I could not install ggplot2 successfully with my installed version. As graphs are important part communicating the data I review I chose the upgrade as the required option. Besides, I like new stuff. So went ahead a downloaded the R source.

If you only want to use R on the command line, then its a build like any other build and you can stop reading. Remove the synaptic version, then unpack, build, and install, have fun.

I followed the online instructions for R and then installed the latest version of RStudio(93.84). It reported no errors during the installation, but when I tried to start it, I got a rather cryptic error message.
It said something like did I enable enable-R-shlib? But it didn't say if I should or should not have enabled it. Turns out you should if you want to use RStudio.

Simply do the include the --enable-R-shlib in your configure statement:
./configure --enable-R-shlib
then
make
sudo make install
Now RStudio runs, which is good but there is more.
If you want to run the byte code compiler, you have to compile that as an extra step, which is in the docs.
One the reason I wanted to upgrade RStudio was to use the library Manipulate. The documentation for RStudio says it comes with Manipulate which lets you do interactive plotting. It also says RStudio with with any version R compiled from source. However, I get this error message now:
Warning in install.packages :
package ‘manipulate’ is not available (for R version 2.13.0)

I guess I will not be using this feature for now. I did get ggplot2 to work with this setup.

I'll follow up on my future use of R with RStudio.