The silence has been deafening in respect of my latest cri de coeur
about trying to install R via "sudo apt-get r-base".
I have been thrashing around on my own, and getting nowhere.
What I have tried is removing all traces of the "old" (installed from
source) R from the system. I did "whereis R" and then moved all of the
relevant directories that appeared, into a safe-keeping "repository"
that I created in my home directory.
I then typed “R” and got, as expected, “R: Command not found.”
I then did
sudo apt purge r-base
and this appeared to work. Next I did
sudo apt update
and this seemed to run OK; lots of output, but no error messages.
Finally I did
sudo apt-get install r-base
This too seemed to run without complaint. It *said* it was installing
r-base 3.5.2:
Preparing to unpack .../r-base_3.5.2-1bionic_all.deb ...
Unpacking r-base (3.5.2-1bionic) ...
Setting up r-base (3.5.2-1bionic) ...
But when, after having done this install, I typed "R" I again got
"R: Command not found."
And typing "whereis R" produced "R:". I.e., nowhere.
The install process does not seem to have produced an executable R.
I don't understand this.
There must be something else that I need to do. What is it? Can I force
the install to create the executable? How?
Can't somebody *please* help me? I am going mad!
cheers,
Rolf Turner
P.S. Elsewhere I was advised to trying using "checkinstall" to install
the old R (i.e. 3.5.1) from source. This, I was told, would install the
old R version in such a way that it would be compatible with the "sudo
apt-get install" paradigm.
After a *great* deal of travail I managed to get
sudo checkinstall make install
(command issued in the "build directory" for R 3.5.1) to work. And work
it did, creating an R executable as well as a *.deb file.
I then thought I'd be able to do:
sudo apt purge r-base
to get rid of R 3.5.1 (i.e. that which I had just installed) followed by
sudo apt-get install r-base
to put in R 3.5.2. It all *appeared* to work; no error messages and
again it seemed to say that it was installing 3.5.2.
But then I fired up R and just got the 3.5.1 version that I'd just
installed using "checkinstall". (The "purge" did *not* get rid of the
executable and the infrastructure on which the executable depends. And
the "sudo apt-get install r-base" command apparently did *not* create
new infrastructure.)
Why does the universe *do* these things to me???
R. T.
--
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276
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