On Sunday, October 17, 2010 10:27:48 am noclue_ wrote: > How to install R on Linux via source compilation? > Has anybody done it? > I could not find step by step instructions online. > > I would appreciate if you could share your experience. >
If you are new to linux, I would strongly recommend using a package manager for your release (e.g. apt-get for ubuntu) and using the available binary. If you need to be on the bleeding edge then you will have to compile and install. Download the source archive, e.g. R-2.12.0.tar.gz, from CRAN. The simplest route from here would to bring up a BASH terminal and cd to the directory where the file was written during download. Uncompress it using tar, e.g. tar xzvf R-2.12.0,tar.gz That should uncompress the file to a new sub directory within the download directory. For instance, if your download directory is /home/<your user name>/downloads, then the new directory will be /home/<your user name>/downloads/R-2.12.0. Change to that directory. Listing the contents will show you a number of files including a file named "INSTALL." Read that file first. Then check the other files it points to before doing anything else. It gives directions on the compilation and installation process for local or site-wide installation. The INSTALL file tells you run "configure." You will need to execute that file by typing "./configure" since you want to execute that specific configure script rather than another one that might be lurking somewhere in the path. Configure will stream a loooonnnngggg list of "checking ...." messages. If critical elements are missing it will halt and give a message such as: configure: error: --with-x=yes (default) and X11 headers/libs are not available Every error that halts configure will need to be corrected by installing the missing element or adding a symbolic link to the correct file in the directory where configure looks for it. Many of the missing elements will available through the "development" packages that various releases of linux offer. The process will likely be incremental as each fix and execution will allow configure to run a little longer until the next error is encountered. Configure generates a file config.log that is informative about what is taking place. Grepping that file for the term "error" will probably produce a substantial list of less than critical errors. Once you have a clean configure, then you can return to the INSTALL directions. ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
