Re: Trying to get PSPP used in my wife's stats class, need help

[Andrew Choens]

On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 07:18 -0300, Faramir wrote:
> James Turner escribió:
> ...
> > My wife uses a Linux desktop, and is taking a stats class as part of her
> > graduate program.  Since SPSS doesn't run on Linux, I suggest she see if
> > she can use PSPP instead.  Things looked good, until her professor came
> > back and said that he couldn't find chi-squared or ANCOVA in PSPP.  Can
> > anyone help out here?


One of the reasons a project like PSPP is so valuable is because of the
ridiculous price / licensing terms that SPSS uses. However, this is
somewhat mitigated for students. Your wife should be able to by a
"student" version of SPSS fairly cheaply through the university. This
version of SPSS will have all of the analysis tools available in a
normal version of SPSS. The student version has some restrictions (I
forget the details) regarding the size of the dataset it can work with.
They limit the number of rows, but I'm sure the restrictions are well
above what she would need for a basic stats class.

Also, newer versions of SPSS are written in Java, and are thus naturally
cross-platform. Here is a thread about installing SPSS 16 under Ubuntu
that may be of use / interest:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=724613

Although I use FOSS whenever possible, there are times when I must use
proprietary software (including SPSS). Fortunately, companies are
starting to recognize / support Linux, making it easier for us to use
Linux as a primary computer platform.

Enjoy.

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