[R-sig-Fedora] Installing R on RedHat EL 5

[Marc Schwartz]

On Nov 13, 2009, at 1:59 PM, Christos Hatzis wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am totally new to Linux and trying to install R and related  
> tools.  I
> downloaded the rpm files for el4/x86_64 from the CRAN repository and
> tried to run rpm but it did not go through complaining about
> dependencies.
>
> Do all the listed rpm files need to be installed?  What is the order  
> in
> which these need to be installed?
>
> I appreciate any help with this or any suggestions for alternate ways
> for installing pre-compiled versions of R and the packages in RHL.
>
> Thanks.
> -Christos Hatzis

The easiest way is to use the EPEL, which is a yum repository for RHEL  
and CentOS.

There is more information here:

   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

with the key steps here in the FAQ:

   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ#howtouse

If you are on 64 bit RHEL, you will need to replace the 'i386' in the  
first command's path with 'x86_64':

   su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm'

Then replace 'foo' in the second command with 'R', which will install  
R and any other dependencies that you may require:

   su -c 'yum install R'

Note that the latest version available appears to be 2.9.2 and I  
suspect that this is due to the imminent release of Fedora 12, which  
is presumably consuming Tom Callaway and others at the moment.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz