Installing R on Ubuntu

Question

I am a new user of Ubuntu and facing lot problem in fetching R packages from the nearby CRAN repository. I am using Ubuntu v10.04 and R v2.14.1. I am not able to fetch package like twittR, plyR etc. . Can anyone tell me the appropriate steps for it as I have to use this for performing sentiment analysis on twitter data. is it because of old versions of the softwares??

Answer 1

First, get Ubuntu 14.04. What are you doing with 10.04?

Add the public key for the Ubuntu CRAN release:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E084DAB9

Add a nearby CRAN mirror to the deb list by editing the sources.list:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

In the file, add this line to the end of the file:

deb http://watson.nci.nih.gov/cran_mirror/bin/linux/ubuntu trusty/

This will add the Bethesda NIH R mirror to our ubuntu trusted sources list. Next, we will update apt-get packages:

sudo apt-get update

Finally, install (the updated versions of) Base-R and Dev-R:

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

To set up a shared library folder, edit .bash_profile and/or .bashrc to set up

R_LIBS_USER='directory_of_your_choice'.

Do make sure to set proper read/write permissions for your users. For more help, go the the AskUbuntu stack exchange .

Answer 2

Your software installation is five years old so you limit yourself to what was available five years ago . For current packages, use a current R on a current OS installation.

I update every six months (usually a month or two after the release) to the then-current Ubuntu version. Works like a charm.