Is it impossible to install R 4.0 on Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS because r-base-core requires a libc6 version >= 2.29?

Question

I am trying to install R 4.0 on Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS but I keep getting errors of

> sudo apt install r-base-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 r-base-core : Depends: libc6 (>= 2.29) but 2.27-3ubuntu1 is to be installed
               Depends: libicu66 (>= 66.1-1~) but it is not installable
               Depends: libreadline8 (>= 6.0) but it is not installable
               Recommends: r-recommended but it is not going to be installed
               Recommends: r-base-dev but it is not going to be installed
               Recommends: r-doc-html but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

when trying to install. I have removed and deleted R 3.6.3 and have added

deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran40/

in my /etc/apt/sources.list file. Note that the above requires libc6 (>= 2.29) yet from what I have seen, it is NOT AVAILABLE for 18.04. Does this mean I have to upgrade to 19.04, or 20.04 in order to run R 4.0?

Answer 1

I am using Ubuntu 18.04, for this there should be a single source deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran40/ in /etc/apt/sources.list Unfortunately, I added deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu focal-cran40/ by mistake which I removed to install R 4.0 R is successfully installed now.

Answer 2

The problem may to be with your /etc/apt/sources.list . Please check whether you have disabled all other repositories for R in there, eg it should not contain lines like deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran35/

Answer 3

Question: Is your system otherwise current to 18.04? If so, the upgrade should just work . I wrote a blog post (prior to the release) about testing R 4.0.0 on 18.04 along with a video:

• blog post http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2020/04/11#024_rocker_r_4_0_0_testing
• slides with links http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/papers/r4_r400_binaries.pdf
• video showing the upgrade https://youtu.be/aa9lZJ7ZzKM

Two more recent (related) posts at http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/code/r4/ as well.

In short, on a system that is otherwise well (ie no other packages forced or conflicts or what have you), one just adds the new repo (shown in slides and video), updates the apt index and upgrades. I have done the same for my 19.10 Ubuntu system in another video.

Answer 4

For Ubuntu User

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Remove each line which is similar of the below given path

deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran40/

save it and exit from editor

Then try to install R 4.1.3 as per the given way from the below link

https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/

Answer 5

I have 18.04 and want R 4.x

I had to edit the etc/apt/sources.list to

1. not have R 3.5 in the sources
2. instead of having '... focal-cran40/' to have '... bionic-cran40/'.

Then I used

sudo apt update
sudo apt install r-base

and it all worked

Answer 6

Yes. It may be a bug in that specific package/version but you should upgrade to a newer Ubuntu version if you wish to use that package.

Upgrading Ubuntu is achieved using the command sudo do-release-upgrade . This assumes your user is authorised to run root/administrative commands. More detail may be found on the Ubuntu community site .

If waiting for a fix or upgrading aren't palatable, you may find running R in a Docker container is a better solution. This is an increasingly common method for running awkward development tools.

• An introduction may be found here: https://colinfay.me/docker-r-reproducibility/
• The Docker equivalent of the package you noted is here: https://hub.docker.com/_/r-base

Answer 7

I just met the same problems while install R 4.0 on Ubuntu 20.04 here is my solutions. first I just want install R instead of r-base-core and so on. it didn't work that install all the r-base-core and r-base-dev so on. read the official document https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/#install-r carefully. if the problems still exist, try renew /etc/apt/sources.list use the complete document or cope the backup ones