[R] download CRAN packages and proxy config.

[Uwe Ligges]

"Joao Pedro W. de Azevedo" wrote:
> 
> Dear R users,
> 
> I'm starting to get acquainted with R. I've been reading the manual, and I
> understood that if I wanted to install a user written package on R, I could
> do it directly from the Internet, by typing the line
> install.packages("quantreg") in an R session.
> 
> To my surprise this command did not work, nor did the command "update
> packages from CRAN..." from the menu option. In the latter I got the
> following error message:
> 
> <- CRAN.packages()
> + install.packages(select.list(a[,1],,TRUE), .libPaths()[1], available=a)}
> trying URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/PACKAGES'
> unable to connect to 'cran.r-project.org'.
> Error in download.file(url = paste(contriburl, "PACKAGES", sep = "/"),  :
>         cannot open URL
> `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/PACKAGES'
> >
> 
> The strange thing was that I was able to visit the internet address the R
> was trying to connect, from my web browser. Thus I imagine that the problem
> was a proxy issue on R.
> 
> I would sincerely appreciate if one of the more experience R user could help
> me to sort this issue out. I found a way to configure my proxy setting by
> typing on the main window '"http://wwwcache.ncl.ac.uk:8080/"', however it
> didn't seem to have worked, as I kept getting the same error message when I
> tried to connect the CRAN.
> 
> Any help would be extremely appreciated,
> 
> Joao Pedro/

Please read Section 2.16 "The internet download functions fail." of the
R for Windows FAQ.

Uwe Ligges