[R] Installing R and an editor on a USB drive

[Mike Marchywka]

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> Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 12:47:10 +0200
> From: hkahra at gmail.com
> To: R-help at r-project.org
> Subject: [R] Installing R and an editor on a USB drive
>
> Hi,
>
> I have adviced my students to install R and an editor on a USB drive for
> working in the computer class. With R everything works fine following these
> instructions: http://personal.bgsu.edu/~mrizzo/Rmisc/usbR.htm.
>
> But several editors (e.g., Tinn-R and WinEdt) require administrator rights.

> http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/ressources/emacs/windows) can be installed
> without administrator rights. There is, however, one problem. I have edited
> the site-start.el file and adjusted the path variable:
>
> (setq inferior-R-program-name "G:/r-2.12.0/bin/i386/rterm.exe")
>

If you really need hard absolute paths, I guess you could have it look for
R in a start up script. Presumably removable or plug-n-play media
won't be too consistent and it isn't hard to scan a few drive letters.
For example, I just wrote this on cygwin ( hotmail and R spam filter have been
redacting my mail, there should be a one line script here LOL ) 

$ for f in `mount | cut -c 1 | sort | uniq `; do echo `cygpath $f:` ; done
/cygdrive/c
/cygdrive/d
/cygdrive/f

The above lists all my drives, f is a flash stick. and you could find one with
R and write that to the start file. 



> since R is installed on the G drive. Everything works if R is on G, but when
> changing the computer, R is usually on another drive and Emacs cannot find
> it. Is it possible to handle this case?
>

> subdirectory of the "home" directory that is on the hard drive. Is it
> possible to have the init.el file on the USB drive?
>
> Thank you!
>
> Hannu
oducible code.