I tend to minimise the instances when I have to change of Linux version on my computer (a Macbook Pro Santa Rosa), for this always is a traumatic event with potential consequences on my work, and therefore I had postponed leaving Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) in a typical procrastinating attitude, i.e. till something stopped working! This happened yesterday with a failed attempt at upgrading R and I thus moved to Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), using the upgrade option rather than re-installing the whole thing from scratch. The only manual steps were to change xorg.conf to accomodate the touchpad and to install madwif to get access to the wireless—the most frustrating part was finding a valid address! (Upgrading Ubuntu means that each intermediate version needs to be installed before moving to the next.) Now that everything works nicely (including suspend and hibernate, and my earlier heating problem seems to be resolved as well!), I am wondering whether or not I should move to the next version of Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex, terrible tee-shirt!) or even to the most recent Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope, terrible name: jaundiced jackal, jovial jabiru, jocular jellyfish, or jittery jaguar would have sounded way better! The next animal in the list of releases is a koala, although karmic would hardly have been my adjective of choice)… As an aside about this future release, an interesting announcement is that Ubuntu 9.10 would support cloud computing.
Today, as I was trying to install SpatialEpi to use the Scotland lip cancer data in 
the last chapter of Bayesian Core, I realised my version of R, R Version 2.6.1, was hopelessly out of date! As I am also using Hardy Heron, a somehow antiquated version of Ubuntu on my Mac, upgrading R took some effort as well. I eventually found that adding the line
Xi'an's Og 
