[R] installing R on RedHat

[Marc Schwartz]

On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 22:18 -0500, Erin Hodgess wrote:
> Dear R People:
> 
> Yet again, I am attempting to install R on RedHat Linux.
> 
> Here is my sorry attempt to date:
> [hodgess at gator hodgess]$ rpm -vi R.rpm
> warning: R.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 97d3544e
> error: cannot write to %sourcedir /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
> 
> I only want to write it to my own userid, since I am the only one
> who uses it.
> 
> Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Erin,

As far as I know, the R RPMS provide either by Martyn Plummer et al on
CRAN, or more recently via Fedora Extras, are generally not
relocatable. 

In other words, they must be installed as root into a pre-defined
location.

I checked the list archive and this had come up last year:

http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/tmp/Rhelp02a/archive/53976.html

and I don't know that this has changed.

If you need to install only as a local user, you will likely need to do
so from source as I referenced in the above thread. See the R-admin
manual for more information on how to configure for this.

More generally, if you have root access on your system, the default on
Linux is to install using system-wide configurations, not per user, even
if you are the only user.

User specific installation is generally only used if you need to install
something and do not have root access.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz