R

R is an open source programming language intended for use within statistical computing and data analysis. It is not installed by default on the Linux desktop platform but it can be installed easily via the following command in a terminal:

sudo yum install R

Installing R packages

There are two methods to installing R packages. Either install them via yum or via CRAN within R itself. Only a limited number of packages are available via yum so we recommend using R itself.

To find the list of R packages you can install via yum run this command:

sudo yum list R-\*

Since very few packages are available its best to install packages via CRAN from within R. First start R in a terminal:

R

then enter the following command:

install.packages("pkgname")

Replace pkgname with the package to install, e.g. for Bio3D:

install.packages("bio3D")

You can install multiple packages like this:

install.packages(c("bio3D","devtools"))

The first time you try to install packages R will prompt you to install into your home directory and create a library there, do so and you will be able to install R packages.

Note

If you wish to install the devtools package you should first run the command sudo yum install openssl-devel libcurl-devel libssh2-devel so that the prerequisite development files are available.

Sadly there is no easy way to allow via sudo the ability for you to install R packages system wide so any user can use them. This is because you must first start R as root and execute a specific command. We’ll keep working on a way to solve this but as for now you’ll need to install R packages in your home directory - sorry about that!