Upgrade R and RStudio

You can always pick your favorite mirror from mirror links.

Next, you will need to do something about secure APT, and there are some difficulties if you are behind a firewall. I have tried many options from the help page, but the one that works for me starts from the line...

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Some people have reported difficulties using this approach. The issue is usually related to a firewall blocking port 11371. If the first gpg command fails, you may want to try (thanks to Mischan Toosarani for the tip):

gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys E084DAB9

and then feed it to apt-key with

gpg -a --export E084DAB9 | sudo apt-key add -

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Next, I just follow the instruction on the page:

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

and now it works without error messages. I then open the RStudio and found the R version is updated already.

Upgrade RStudio

First go to RStudio download page and select the .deb file appropriate to your system. Mine is

RStudio 0.98.490 - Debian 6+/Ubuntu 10.04+ (64-bit)

Download the .deb file. I store the downloaded file in ~/Downloads directory. I found the instruction on this page very helpful.

First I install the package gdepi which facilitates convenient installation of .deb file. Just type the command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install gdebi-core

Next, you can install the .dep page using command:

sudo gdebi <name of downloaded rstudio file ending in .deb>

in my case, it is

 sudo gdebi rstudio-0.98.490-amd64.deb

Now you can restart/open your RStudio and find it's upgraded already.