Upgrading R / Installing R-3.2.0 on Ubuntu

Anirudh Technical, , , ,

Till recently, I was using R-3.1.1 on Windows OS. Then on April 16, 2015 (10 days ago), they released R-3.2.0. Upgrading it on Windows was easy peasy, not like the headache Ubuntu gave me.

I recently got a Dell Vostro 14 3000 series laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 installed. I haven’t yet upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04 because the graphics drivers for this computer aren’t available for that version. Besides, I’m not much of a gamer. If I were, I wouldn’t care for Ubuntu!

Anyway, I tried installing by typing the following on Terminal:

 sudo apt-get update  
 sudo apt-get install r-base r-base-dev

R did get installed, but not the latest version. A much older version R-2.14.1. I later found out after quite a lot of time spent on StackExchange, that I had to choose a CRAN mirror that was geographically close to my computer, which would then act as a “software source” for the latest version of R. Now that explained why the above sudo commands weren’t getting me the desired version of software. It was because the the Ubuntu / Canonical software repositories only had an older R version. Also, the distribution line had to match the codename of my Ubuntu version (12.04 LTS).

 codename=$(lsb_release -c -s)  
 echo "deb http://ftp.iitm.ac.in/cran/bin/linux/ubuntu $codename/" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list > /dev/null

Note that instead of http://ftp.iitm.ac.in/cran one must replace it with the geographically closest CRAN mirror. Also, the Ubuntu archives on CRAN are signed with the key of Michael Rutter <marutter@gmail> with key ID E084DAB9. So we type in the following:

 sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E084DAB9  
 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:marutter/rdev

Followed by what we would normally have done:

 sudo apt-get update  
 sudo apt-get upgrade  
 sudo apt-get install r-base r-base-dev

This did the job for me, and I had R-3.2.0 installed successfully on my Ubuntu system. Compare this to Windows, where all you have to do is type in 3 lines (in R, and not Shell):

install.packages("installr")  
library(installr)  
updateR()

And to think I left Windows for Linux! I am a Linux newb, and God only knows why I wanted to try out Linux, but on giving it some thought, I think I know why


source: https://xkcd.com/456/ and http://xkcd.com/149/

19 thoughts on “Upgrading R / Installing R-3.2.0 on Ubuntu”

  1. Thanks for the nice little how-to.

    But don’t forget one thing about the difference between windows and linux here.

    You made a guide on how to install R. Not only update it. Also it is now automatically updated with your OS. In windows you still have to update it every time manually.

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