INSTALL.in: Install R to local path?

Thank you all very much for your swift and useful replies! I know of
few software packages where the user support is so good..

I now resolved my problems, there turned out to be two distinct ones.
For anybody who might have a similar problem in the future, here are
the solutions that worked for me:

1. I needed to set the --prefix .configure variable; this indeed
performs the substitution in the INSTALL.in script that I meant. Now I
have a clean install in my home directory by setting --prefix=<my home
dir>. The R executable ends up in lib/R/bin and also in bin/.

2. Foreign and other packages were not installing because I had no
execute rights to /tmp. The error I got was "./configure: /bin/sh: bad
interpreter: Permission denied". This was resolved by adding the line

   TMPDIR = '$HOME/tmp'

to the file $R_HOME/etc/Renviron.

Now everything works!

Thanks R-Help,

Daniel

On Wed, 02-Jan-2008 at 10:08PM +0100, Daniel Oberski wrote:

|> Dear all,
|>
|>
|> I am trying to install R on a (Linux Debian) machine where I do not
|> have root access. So far I succeeded in compiling from source and
|> running R.
|>
|> But I would really like to be able to use "make install" and to be
|> able to install certain packages such as foreign. Now these actions
|> require permissions for directories that I do not have.
|>
|> In particular I would like R home to be ~/bin/R, the libraries to
|> reside in ~/lib, and so on.