Install R in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS.

One of my main motivations to install R is Sweave. The Sweave is a literate programming language which integrates LaTeX and R code. The main idea of the Sweave is to combine data analysis code and standard formatted text into a single document.

Installation

The Ubuntu CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network) packages have been signed with a new pgp key. The Ubuntu archives on CRAN are signed with the key of "Michael Rutter<email>" with key ID E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9. To add the key to your system with one command, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and use:

$ sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9

Open your sources.list file in gedit

$ sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

and add the following line (using < face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">http://cran.rstudio.com/< > mirror) at the end of the file:

< face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu/ precise/< >

(You can go to http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html for the list of CRAN mirrors and replace the current URL mirror with your favorite one)

To install the complete R system, use

< face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">$ sudo apt-get update < >

< face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">$ sudo apt-get install r-base< >

if you need to compile R packages from source, also install the < face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">r-base-dev< > package:

< face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">$ sudo apt-get install r-base-dev< >

That's all.