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I’ve installed R in Ubuntu Lucid with the command
sudo aptitude install r-base
When I try to “install.packages” it seems to download source and then spend ages compiling it. How can I get it to just download and install the binaries, like I’m used to on Windows?
Is there any need to compile the packages myself? I’m running inside a VM so it would be great to keep things as slim as possible.
Thanks
CRAN only distributes source for Unix, in other words no binaries are offered (unlike for Windows). So you simply have to compile the packages locally.
That said, we have been working for a few years now on a system to turn CRAN source packages into Debian binary packages — see cran2deb / debian.cran.r-project.org. We currently build i386 binaries for Debian testing and are in the process of rewriting the backend to offer amd64 for Debian again and then eventually i386 and amd64 for Ubuntu. This already offers well over two-thousand binary packages but not yet for all the flavours we would like to support eventually.
If and when that goal will be accomplished is hard to say; this is a volunteer effort and the main developer (Charles) recently lost his laptop.