Home/ Questions/Q 966345
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-16T02:08:34+00:00

Recently I’ve migrated to Arch Linux, after ~4 years being loyal to Ubuntu. Everything

  • 0

Recently I’ve migrated to Arch Linux, after ~4 years being loyal to Ubuntu. Everything works like a charm, it’s noticeably faster than Ubuntu, IMHO it’s easier to customise, but when it is to do with support for R, well, Ubuntu takes a medal. I’m not willing to do another distro-shuffle and switch back to Ubuntu, while Debian is just “too stable” for my taste… so I’ll stick with Arch for now.

Bunch of R packages available from Ubuntu’s universe and/or multiverse repos (like r-cran-* and revolution-r) are not available in Arch. Of course, you can always install packages within R with install.packages, but there are dozens of Debian/Ubuntu R packages, and excuse me for saying this, but it’s painstaking job to track them down. r-cran-lattice can be replaced with install.packages("lattice"), but what about revolution-r (revolution-mkl)? I’d like to have RA optimizations in Arch.

Could you, please, give me some advice about this one? What’s the catch? r-core, r-base-dev, r-base-core-dbg, r-base-core-ra… Actually, I have two questions:

  • What’s the difference between these (r-base-*)
    packages and “standard” R
    installation?
  • And how can I port Debian/Ubuntu packages to Arch (I’m
    talking only about those packages
    that don’t come bundled with an official installation, like r-cran-* and Revolution-R-like packages)?

It would be nice if Arch-ers could have out-of-the-box support for R, like Debian, Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora users. I know it’s manageable, I just want to know how hard it is.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Quick ones:

    • Debian is just “too stable” is true only if you only look at Debian stable — but you could pick Debian testing (as I do) which gets updated packages on a daily basis once they lasted for ten days on unstable. This works for me and has been for over a decade (!!). You also get cran2deb and 2400+ binary r-cran-* deb packages (currently i386 only)

    • difference between r-base-* and “standard” R: none. I try hard to maintain these packages without deviances, yet you get little extras like tab completion etc

    • port from Arch: no idea, as Debian (and Ubuntu) work for me

    In short, looks like you picked something different and now seem to notice it is different (as in “less complete support for R”).

    • 0