Lately, I decided to install R version 3.5.0 from source because the Ubuntu’s R repository maintainers are way too late to get the binary up and running. I did not complain about their decent voluntary works, I just can’t wait to try out new features and improvements. Also, I’ve read some good things about building software from source, so this is a chance to boost up my technical expertise.
The installation process was actually not so hard as I thought. But it still took me three times to get the configurations right on my computer systems. In what follows, I note down some issues which I encountered during the process.
R failed to recognize tcltk capability even though I have tcl and tk installed and up-to-date on my machine. I skipped this immediately because I hardly ever do GUI programming in R.
R declined to activate cairo graphics engine despite that capability check returned
TRUE. After three minutes searching around the Web, I found a quick hack as the following:
## put these codes in .Rprofile
setHook(packageEvent("grDevices", "onLoad"),
function(...) grDevices::X11.options(type = 'cairo'))
options(device = 'x11')
- Since I maintain multiple versions of R, I have to set up symbolic links
pointing to R 3.5.0 executable files (
R,Rscript) so that they are always searched by my system’s which R.