Upgrade R and RStudio

Post date: Jan 6, 2014 11:23:00 PM

In this post I share my experience on upgrading R version and upgrading RStudio version on Ubuntu 12.04.

Upgrading R and upgrading RStudio are two independent process. You can upgrade R version without upgrading RStudio by first upgrading R, then restart RStudio, and the program is smart enough to point to the right location of the upgraded R version.

R Installation

In my situation, I'm using R 3.0.1 and I want to upgrade to 3.0.2, and I'm behind the firewall of a company. I found the help page from CRAN most useful and it works for me.

First of all, I type the following command in the terminal

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

and I appended the following lines to the sources.list

# Bot edit

deb http://cran.fhcrc.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/ precise/

Note that I like Fred Hutchinson mirror, so I use the URL: 

cran.fhcrc.org

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...

------

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 -

------

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.