[R] Problem installing/loading packages from Africa

[Tim Werwie]

I'm very new to R and I live in Mali, west Africa. I'm on *OS X 10.7.5*. I
downloaded and installed *R 3.2.1*. I downloaded and installed *RStudio
00.99.893*.

I ran through the free Microsoft data camp intro to R course, then started
another free course through 'edX', for Data and Statistics for Life
Sciences, using R. The first prompt in the course is to
install.packages("swirl"). Copied below are the various error messages I
get when trying to install or load any package.

My best guess is that the problems I'm having are due to being in west
Africa, with unreliable connections, weak connections and no CRAN Mirror
closer than Italy or Spain (as far as I know). I checked into common
package errors on the RStudio page, but I'm not confident enough in my
computing to get into internet proxies and some of the other suggested
troubleshooting.

Any insight would be very helpful. See error messages below. Thanks -- Tim

- When attempting to install, the print-out I get in the Console in RStudio
is any length of: > install.packages("swirl")
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time
Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left
Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--  0:00:10
--:--:--     0  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:--
0:00:10 --:--:--     0  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0
--:--:--  0:00:11 --:--:--     0 22  207k   22 48384    0     0   3833
0  0:00:55  0:00:12  0:00:43 19740 30  207k   30 64823    0     0
4808      0  0:00:44  0:00:13  0:00:31 19578 38  207k   38 81207    0
0   5638      0  0:00:37  0:00:14  0:00:23 19193 46  207k   46 97591
0     0   6299      0  0:00:33  0:00:15  0:00:18 20076 53  207k   53
111k    0     0   6966      0  0:00:30  0:00:16  0:00:14 22717 69  207k
69  143k    0     0   8423      0  0:00:25  0:00:17  0:00:08 20487 76
207k   76  159k    0     0   8821      0  0:00:24  0:00:18  0:00:06 19621
92  207k   92  191k    0     0  10085      0  0:00:21  0:00:19  0:00:02
22841100  207k  100  207k    0     0  10363      0  0:00:20  0:00:20
--:--:-- 230100  207k  100  207k    0     0  10363      0  0:00:20  0:00:20
--:--:-- 23922
The downloaded binary packages are in

/var/folders/yb/7z339kn56mdbwx92ydmsqswc0000gn/T//RtmpBzQ16u/downloaded_packages

For other packages, ggplot2, forexample, a similar printout can run for
hundreds and hundred of lines. So RStudio tells me that the packages are
available to load, BUT:

- when *loading* any package an error comes up saying package 'name of
package' was built under R version 3.2.5 but info on swirl says it should
work on any version of R above 3.0.2. I get similar errors for other
packages (treemap, ggplot2, etc).

- Or sometimes I"ll get this: Error : .onAttach failed in attachNamespace()
for 'swirl', details: call: stri_c(..., sep = sep, collapse = collapse,
ignore_null = TRUE)
error: object 'C_stri_join' not found
In addition: Warning message:
package ‘swirl’ was built under R version 3.2.5
Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘swirl’

Any suggestions?

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