installing R on Ubuntu

On Sun, 2009-02-08 at 16:21 -0500, Jonathan Baron wrote:
As much as I love Fedora (and I've used it from Core 1 onwards and
haven't been swayed by Ubuntu's lovely brownness), I should point out
that it need *not* be as simple as you make out on Fedora. Your
install.packages("foo") invocation does require that you have installed
all the build tools and development packages required to compile "foo"
from source.

Sorry.  Instead of

yum install R

I should have said

yum install R-devel

I believe that this will install all the build tools needed for almost
all packages, as well as R itself and its dependencies.  I admit I had
trouble with rgl, which compiled on one computer and not another (both
with Fedora).  That was the only time this has happened to me in 3
years.  The error message said it required glu.h.  (Googling for that
discovers many problems, many on Ubuntu forums!)  This is part of
mesa-libGLU-devel, which should probably be listed as a dependency of
R-devel.  This is a bug.  Bugs happen, even in Ubuntu.

On finzi.psych.upenn.edu (my R site), for many years, I had all R
packages installed except the ones that were for Windows only.  In the
last year, to save time and the computer, I've started building the
help files only, except for the smaller and smaller proportion that I
actually use.

Jon

Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron