I have only just installed r-base-core (n900 fremantle). My first
thought was that it is surprisingly fast to fire up (the other stats
package I could easily install was Incanter, which runs in Clojure,
and is 10-20 fold slower to load and run).

First problem I encountered was the pager was set to /usr/bin/pager so
that help() did not work: /etc/R/Renvironment needs more felicitous
choices ('more' works OK for me). The graphics demo worked beautifully,
as do a random set of example()'s I ran.

Installing R packages from source is a challenge on many platforms,
because of the toolchain required. It seems difficult to get a maemo
Fortran -- the octave port used f2c AIUI. My usual g95 does not extend to
arm, let alone armel, and I am not looking forward to making a gfortran
cross-compiler from source for my own uses. Nevertheless, at least the
recommended packages should be available as binary packages.

just 2c, David Duffy.