[R-sig-Debian] Installing Rstudio and shiny free server on Debian

[Chris Evans]

First, as I'm here and owe it: huge thanks to Dirk and others who maintain the Debian packaging. 

Second: I realise these questions are not right on topic here and I will go to the rstudio community support next but I'm failing to find answers elsewhere on the web which makes me suspect they haven't come up there and might well be Debian specific so I suspect that if the expertise I'm looking for is anywhere, it will be here. 

Context: I've run an internet server on Debian systems for about 15 years and Debian is the only distro I've ever used. I'm in the process of moving some ancient, interactive forms that do simple things using CGIwithR to Shiny apps as it'll clearly be way easier for me to create new ones and update existing ones using shiny rather than CGIwithR. I'm starting off using shinyapps.io but I'll have to install the free shiny server in the near future as I can't afford the level at shinyapps.io I will need when I have all the apps I want up and running. 

My server is a VM set up by the excellent ISP, Mythic Beasts running: 
4.9.0-7-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.110-3+deb9u2 (2018-08-13) x86_64 GNU/Linux 

I don't want to do what can clearly be a challenging install on that machine for fear of breaking things there so I've turned an old laptop (Toshiba L-750) into a Debian machine but find I can only install i386 on it (neither amd64 Stretch or Ubuntu install on it, they just hang very shortly after starting the install). 

So here I am having a dry run on that i386 stretch. For now I've got R up to 3.4.4 and pulled the shiny server down from https://download2.rstudio.org/rstudio-server-1.1.463-i386.deb as per https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download-server/ | https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download-server/ and I've tried installing it but it fails on a dependency on libgstreamer0.10-0 and on libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 and installing Rstudio seems to fail on the first dependency.

Clearly I could start testing out the route of compiling both from source, or I assume I could for the shiny server at least as the instructions seem to be fairly clear.

However, I thought I'd ask here if anyone had any experience of installing Rstudio and the free shiny server on Stretch.

Meanwhile, I'll go hunting around a couple of other old machines I have around to see if I can find one that'll install amd64 Stretch!

TIA,

Chris

-- 
Chris Evans <chris using psyctc.org> Skype: chris-psyctc
Visiting Professor, University of Sheffield <chris.evans using sheffield.ac.uk>
I do some consultation work for the University of Roehampton <chris.evans using roehampton.ac.uk> and other places but this <chris using psyctc.org> remains my main Email address.
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