Installing packages

Hello,

I am a brand new Linux user running Ubuntu 20.04. Apologies if my question
is extremely basic.

In R, I am having trouble downloading some packages (apaTables, apaStyle,
OpenMx, MBESS, gsl). This post
<https://blog.zenggyu.com/en/post/2018-01-29/installing-r-r-packages-e-g-tidyverse-and-rstudio-on-ubuntu-linux/>
makes me think that the problem is that they reference non-R packages.
However, I don't know what to do about it. Can anybody help me?

Any advice for a new Linux user would be appreciated, too! I am considering
hopping to another distro, possibly Debian, once I get the hang of it.

Thanks,
Jimmy

Jimmy,

I would highly recommend reading the web page about Ubuntu on CRAN, 
especially the section about using the c2d4u 4.0 repository.

https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/#get-5000-cran-packages

I would then install the bspm package (Bridge to System Package Manager) 
with (from the Ubuntu command line):

sudo apt install r-cran-bspm

This will utilize apt from within R whenever possible.

Michael

| > In R, I am having trouble downloading some packages (apaTables, apaStyle,
| > OpenMx, MBESS, gsl). This post

Some of those are not simple but complex. The devil, as always, is in the detail.

| > <https://blog.zenggyu.com/en/post/2018-01-29/installing-r-r-packages-e-g-tidyverse-and-rstudio-on-ubuntu-linux/>
| > makes me think that the problem is that they reference non-R packages.
| > However, I don't know what to do about it. Can anybody help me?
| > 
| > Any advice for a new Linux user would be appreciated, too! I am considering
| > hopping to another distro, possibly Debian, once I get the hang of it.
| > 
| > Thanks,
| > Jimmy
| 
| Jimmy,
| 
| I would highly recommend reading the web page about Ubuntu on CRAN, 
| especially the section about using the c2d4u 4.0 repository.
| 
| https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/#get-5000-cran-packages
| 
| I would then install the bspm package (Bridge to System Package Manager) 
| with (from the Ubuntu command line):
| 
| sudo apt install r-cran-bspm
| 
| This will utilize apt from within R whenever possible.

Strongly seconded.

I wrote a number of blog posts in the topic which you can find (in reverse
chronological order) below this URL:

   https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/code/r4/

You can skip a few but there are probably at least half a dozen posts on the
very topic of _more easily_ installing CRAN binaries on Ubuntu.

Dirk

https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org