How to Install R on Linux Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus

The long-awaited new Ubuntu LTS Xenial Xerus was released last week. I wrote a tutorial on installing R and R-Studio on the old 14.04 LTS, so I figured I’d update that document. Not much has changed for the new 16.04 version but there are new repositories.

Install R-Base

You can find R-Base in the Software Center; this would be the easy way to do it. However, the Software Center versions are often out of date, which can be a pain moving foward when your packages are based on the most current version of R Base. The easy fix is to download and install R Base directly from the Cran servers.

1. Add R repository

First, we’ve got to add a line to our /etc/apt/sources.list file. This can be accomplished with the following. Note the “xenial” in the line, indicating Ubuntu 16.04. If you have a different version, just change that.

sudo echo "deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu xenial/" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

2. Add R to Ubuntu Keyring

First:

 gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9

Then:

 gpg -a --export E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9 | sudo apt-key add -

3. Install R-Base

Most Linux users should be familiar with the old…

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r-base r-base-dev

Installing R-Studio

From here you can download your files and install the IDE through Ubuntu Software Center or Synaptic Package Manager, or since you’ve already got the terminal open, you could just:

sudo apt-get install gdebi-core
wget https://download1.rstudio.org/rstudio-0.99.896-amd64.deb
sudo gdebi -n rstudio-0.99.896-amd64.deb
rm rstudio-0.99.896-amd64.deb

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R-bloggers’ editors note: an earlier version of this article mentioned the use of E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9. That key is vulnerable to a now known bug due to its short size. Googling it will reveal that the longer key is that one that should be used. See here.