[R] Installing R into home directory?

[p_connolly at slingshot.co.nz]

On Tue, 01-Jul-2008 at 09:46AM +0100, Steve Cadman wrote:

|> I've been trying to install R into a user's home directory for them
|> by compiling from source code, on a machine for which neither of us
|> has administrative access.  I've run configure using the --prefix
|> option to specify their home directory.

I don't find that necessary.  Simply run ./configure from the
directory you wish the installation to take place, then 'make' works
fine.  My guess is that you are not working as the owner of that
/home/ directory, otherwise, you'd have no problem AFAIK.  I could see
that would create issues (not that I've tried it).

|>
|> This seems to work OK up to a point, but when running make, it
|> seems to expect to be able to install IDL into /usr/local/, and if
|> you are unable to do this, you seem to have to abort make.  Any
|> ideas as to how I can work round this?

So I suppose you never got as far as 'make install'.  Well, it's not
necessary, even if it is possible.  I make a link in my ~/bin/
directory which points to the R executable I've created by the make
process.  Of course, you'd have to do something else if the user
doesn't have  ~/bin/ in the PATH.

That's a handy approach in that it gives you the ability to have
several versions of R available, and unless you have a defect in your
OS, installing R on Linux is a doddle.

HTH
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