How to Install R Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial

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 However, the Software Center versions are often out of date, which can be a pain moving foward when your packages are based on the most current version of R Base.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.

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

Add R to Ubuntu Keyring

First

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

Then

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

Install R Base

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

Install RStudio

RStudio is not currently in the Software Center, but that may contain an outdated version. It can easily be installed manually.

sudo apt-get install gdebi-core
wget https://download1.rstudio.org/rstudio-1.0.143-amd64.deb
sudo gdebi -n rstudio-1.0.143-amd64.deb
rm rstudio-1.0.143-amd64.deb