Open BUGS under linux

These notes were written December 2005; they may well be out of date by the time you read this.
Update March 2007, November 2008: expect problems if you have a recent version of linux. Ubuntu “Dapper” 6.06 LTS works though.

Current advice, March 2006

• By all means try the advice below, but if it does not work (likely on recent versions of linux) I cannot help. Sorry.
• I have not tried it, but you could try JAGS, which looks a lot easier to build and use in a free software environment.
• You could try running BUGS under wine. But I have not tried this myself.

Old advice, December 2005 (updated November 2008)

First get Open BUGS.

I was told not to use the old classic BUGS any more because it is very old and unsupported (although it still works as before). So I'm working out how to use Open BUGS under linux, which is proving to be a bit of a moving target.

The latest version seemed to be missing some files? I have not chased this up. Anyway get that, unzip, and then copy these files in to the root directory:

New versions that work with OpenBugs 3.0.3 and on Ubuntu Dapper 6.06. It won’t work on distributions with newer kernel/C libraries and I don’t know how to hack around this easily. Sorry.:

• linbugs
• cbugs (only if it does not already exist, built from CBugs.c)
• eg_cmd

I made these versions in December 2005, but they don’t seem to work now:

• linbugs
• cbugs (only if it does not already exist, built from CBugs.c)
• eg_cmd

linbugs is my hacked up version of the initialization script, which starts up cbugs, a classic bugs like interface to Open BUGS (i386 linux binary). Compiling Open BUGS for other platforms seems to be involved.

Use of cbugs does not seem to be documented anywhere(?). Currently (although this has changed twice) it seems to be related to the R interface, so see the documentation for that. (Note the R interface itself does not work under linux yet.) The eg_cmd file is about the simplest possible session to run one of the many examples included with Open BUGS. Note the translation from the R documentation to the necessary commands are all of the form: model.compile() -> modelCompile(). You would either type in the commands or pipe them in with:

./linbugs < eg_cmd

I have not verified it is actually working correctly yet. Just that it runs. See David MacKay's list of links for other things to look at.