First things first: the joke. If Pluribus were writing this post, it would read as follows:

1. Don't.
2. Install R.

I, however, have nothing like the massive kung fu that he has. In fact, one would say that if he is Master Shifu, then this is me:

That being said, as much as I like R, I'm still dependent on SPSS to do what I want to do, and while I love Ubuntu and Linux at large, I still have some massive mis-steps. This is a how-to built out of one of those mis-steps.

In our last Cool Tools, we covered what to do when we run into trouble with our new Linux installs. Knowing that, we're ready to try adding new programs and updating our old ones.

So now you've had a while to use your new Linux system. If you're like many others, you may have been initially surprised by how many things just work. But even so, it is useful to know how to deal with any problems that may arise. That's what we'll be covering today.

We'd be remiss if we didn't note that we're not the only ones that think open source products are the way to go for stable, usable and powerful systems. The Obama campaign used Ubuntu 8.04 in their campaign offices across the nation. (Though it seems that Barack Obama tends to favor Macs himself.)

In the first installment of Cool Tools, I explained what the series is all about: giving everyone the ability to set up and use a set of quality tools for statistical analysis. Now we get into the nitty-gritty of actually building the system that will do this for us.