statistics software alternative to SPSS or STATA

There's Project R, a mature, open-source statistical computing package.

And then there's SOFA - Statistics Open For All - which not only intends to create a mature statistical computing tool, but make it easy as well.

Both package will run on Linux, Windows or the MacOS.

Best Ubuntu repository in Southeast Asia

I've never found a repo mirrin in the Philippines that's fast or updated, so I usually get my updates elsewhere, Taiwan or Malaysia.  I (belatedly) found this Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) Ubuntu repository hosted in Singapore:
http://ap-southeast-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu/

It's pretty fast, and I there's little doubt about their capacity, considering their commercial requirements.

Just add it to your sources.list.

xubuntu 12.04 - 2 steps forward, 3 steps back.

It took me two long days to get Xubuntu 12.04 installed in my computer. I burned myself a live disc and reformatted the OS partition of drive, but in the middle of the installation I found my copy faulty, and I ended with no operating system, except for a live CD and a home partition I couldn't access because I had it encrypted.


I went through my old stack of live CDs, trying to get a copy of a live CD I could use to burn myself a new copy. The thumb drives I tried wasn't working, too. It was so frustrating I gave myself two days break from the computer.


Anyway, I was trying to choose between super-light Lubuntu or Xubuntu but decided to ditch LXDE as I'm more used to XFCE, having used it for so long now.


The new Xubuntu UI is polished and clean and so far the only thing I hate is that I couldn't put my computer on hibernate - like I've always done before. So, after so many years of never having to shutdown a computer, I'm now forced to do without it.


I hope the Xubuntu devs are working on a fix. Come on. I had hibernate/suspend working on 6.04, 7.04, 8.04, 10.04 and now that we're on 12.04 you decide that this "feature" is important since it doesn't work on most new systems anyway? What a cop out. 


Anyway, try this recipe and see if you can convince the gnomes in your computer to make it work.


P.S.
I finally got it to work. There seems to be an issue with encrypted swap drives and the default configuration.

Ubuntu on Feisty

Having upgraded my MSI S270 laptop to Ubuntu's Feisty fawn, I kinda got used to the built-in card-reader not working. I've been a long-time user of Ubuntu (Warty Warthog 4.10 whetted my appetite) and now moving up from Dapper Drake 6.10 LTS to Feisty Fawn, after skipping Edgy Eft.

I am surprised to find out that it actually does.

Here's a peek of what I got:

$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge (rev 10)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI Bridge
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 10)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller ATI
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
00:14.6 Modem: ATI Technologies Inc ATI SB400 - AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 01)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE)
02:03.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
02:05.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ711MP1/MS1 MemoryCardBus Controller (rev 21)
02:05.2 Generic system peripheral [0805]: O2 Micro, Inc. Integrated MMC/SD Controller (rev 01)
02:05.3 Bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. Integrated MS/xD Controller (rev 01)
02:05.4 FireWire (IEEE 1394): O2 Micro, Inc. Firewire (IEEE 1394) (rev 02)
02:09.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbus/mini-PCI (rev 01)

The internal card reader for the MSI S270 is working! (Or at least the MMC/SD card reader is working. I don't have an MS card to test.) All the while I thought I had the Ricoh R5C576A reader which isn't working in Linux - yet.

Flash in Ubuntu

Okay, Feisty's been out for more than two weeks now and I finally bit the bullet and did a clean install from a Dapper system.

How is it so far? News apps. New looks. My MSI S270 lappie sports an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M video but I'm experiencing plenty of "White Screen of Death".I go through the same on Dapper but it seems that it happens more often on Feisty. I'm not using ATI's proprietary driver and I'm considering it if it would make my system more stable.

I also decided that I want support Adobe's Macromedia Flash in my 64-bit Ubuntu, which has been a bit of a disappointment since I started using Ubuntu 5.10. Thankfully, I stumbled into Swfdec, which promises open-source flash support! Oh goody!

I tried the repositories. No pre-packaged swfdec yet. Sigh.

So, I downloaded the sources and installed them. No problems there. From a terminal window, I did the following:

(I had to install the build-essential before you can build this app from the sources. You would also need the following libraries: autoconf, automaken, gcc, g++, libglib2.0-dev, libgnomevfs2-dev, libgstreamer0.10-dev, libgtk2.0-dev, libasound2-dev, liboil0.3-dev, libmad0-dev, libavcodec-dev, firefox-dev and libpango1.0-dev )

$ wget http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/download/swfdec/0.4/swfdec-0.4.4.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf swfdec-0.4.4.tar.gz
$ cd swfdec-0.4.4
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ cd ..
$ wget http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/download/swfdec-mozilla/0.4/swfdec-mozilla-0.4.4.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf swfdec-mozilla-0.4.4.tar.gz
$ cd swfdec-mozilla-0.4.4
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Now, we need to tell Firefox where to look for this plugin

$ cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
$ ln -s /usr/local/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/libswfdecmozilla.so

If you don't have a plugin folder, just do:

mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/plugins

Now, did it work for me? Yes and No.

It works for some flash sites (say, YouTube) but crashes on some (like Speedtest.) Well, better than nothing , right?

Oh, by the way, I'm only installing it for Firefox, I want to keep my primary browser, Epiphany, lean and mean.