All of these packages can be easily installed in Ubuntu using the Synaptic package manager or in the terminal with sudo apt-get install <package-name>.

First, I installed R (package name: r-base, r-recommended) and a number of R packages that I find useful in my statistics work: two from Gary King (r-cran-gking-matchit, r-cran-zelig), one from John Fox (r-cran-car), one from Simon Jackman (r-cran-pscl), and two miscellaneous (r-cran-coda, r-cran-rcolorbrewer). R-cran-rcolorbrewer provides nice colour palettes which are designed to minimize confusion and problems with colour blindness.

Second, I installed LyX, which is a user-friendly front-end for LaTeX. LyX is set up so that it installs a LaTeX distribution automagically. I also  installed a number of extras for LaTeX which I’ve found useful: texlive-latex-extra, texlive-humanities, and texlive-generic-extra. In order to get RTF export working, I installed latex2rtf.

Third, since I need some bibliographic software, I installed pybliographer. Nuff said.

Fourth, because I do occasionally watch Youtube, and need other flash and Java cruft, I installed ubuntu-restricted-extras, which provides all the non-free software that Canonical is squeamish about distributing `in the box’.

Finally, because I occasionally do some Perl programming (largely screen-scraping) and because I wanted to play with Plagger, I installed a bunch of perl modules. I prefer installing the Perl modules from the ubuntu repositories instead of using `perl -MCPAN -e shell‘ because with some packages (libxml-libxml-perl, afair) the dependencies are a little bit flaky for Debian-like builds such as Ubuntu. So, I installed

libcrypt-ssleay-perl
libxml-rss-perl (and all dependencies)
libxml-feed-perl (and all dependencies)
libyaml-perl
libconfig-yaml-perl
libxml-libxml-perl (and all dependencies)
libxml-perl
libwww-mechanize-perl (and 2 dependencies)

Now I’m just struggling with

1. getting Google Talk to work in Pidgin behind my university’s network (it worked before, I swear!)
2. getting wireless working with my university wireless network [UPDATE: solved!]
3. getting network printing working with my university’s SAMBA printers [UPDATE: solved!]
4. getting VPN set up so I can access my university network’s resources [needed to  sudo apt-get install network-manager-vpnc, choose weak encryption in network-manager, and insert the special group password]

Do you begin to see the common thread?