[R] installing R on Ubuntu

[Neil Shephard]

The preceived "difficulty" of installing R under whatever flavour of
GNU/Linux in this thread stems from being unfamiliar with the process of the
package management of the flavour of GNU/Linux you use (and in part by the
various distros not having the most recent version of R in their
repositories

People who say "why can't it be as easy as dowloading a self-installing
binary and running that" are trying to fit a round peg (their experience and
understanding of how applications install in M$-windows) in a square hole
(or triangular, hexagonal, or whatever depending on the distribution of
GNU/Linux).

There are pro's and con's to each of the GNU/Linux flavours and its really a
matter of deciding which you like/have invested time in learning.

Irrespective its still simple to install R from source under GNU/Linux...

1) Download source tar-ball
2) Extract and cd to the directory
3) ./configure --prefix=/where/you/want/R/to/go (optionally setting the
install path at this stage)
4) ./make
5) ./make install

...all documented in the FAQ at
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#How-can-R-be-installed-_0028Unix_0029

This might not be as clean as using the native package management, but does
mean that you'll have the latest version installed.

Neil

(Addendum - I've tried several different distros, starting with RedHat 7.3,
then various versions of Slackware 8 through to 9 before settling on Gentoo,
all were easy to install R in).
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