Is R portable?

On Tue, 4 Dec 2007, John Kane wrote:

I simply installed R onto a USB stick, downloaded my
normal packages to it and it works fine under Windows.

Yes, on Windows, but

1) There are other OSes,

2) This didn't just happen: it needed some careful design, including 
some caching to make it run fast from a USB disk.

Unix-alike ports of R are not completely portable, as the path to R_HOME 
is encapsulated in the R and Rscript front ends.  So if on, say, Linux 
you want to plug in a USB disc then it will only work if you installed R 
to that USB disk mounted at the same location in the file system, or are 
prepared to edit the copies of the R script (which had therefore better 
be mounted read-write).

The standard MacOS build has standard paths encapsulated in many places.

--- Roland Rau <roland.rproject at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Tom,

did you check the R for Windows FAQ?

http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rw-FAQ.html#Can-I-run-R-from-a-CD-or-USB-drive_003f 

Hope this helps,
Roland


Tom Backer Johnsen wrote:

Recently I came across an interesting web site:
http://portableapps.com/.  The idea is simple,

this is software that

is possible to install and run on some type of USB

memory, a stick or

one of these hard disks.  I can think of a number

of situations where

this could be handy.  In addition memory sticks

are getting cheaper

and more powerful by the day.

So:  Is it possible to run R off one of these

sticks?

I am also informed that it is possible to run

Latex in this manner.

Tom