Revolution R: installation on debian jessie

Question

I need to install Revolution R on a Debian Jessie (version 8, 64-bit).

On my system there is already installed R 3.1.1 and Rstudio.

The Revolution download page give me three installation package for Ubuntu: 12, 14, 15 (older LTS, current LTS, current version). Rstudio package give instead a single package for both Ubuntu 12.04+ and Debian 8+ (32 and 64-bit versions).

There is a way to understand what is the right package to install?

EDIT: I see from the community group that Debian is not officially supported, but should be OK using an Ubuntu packages.

Answer 1

It seems OK to install Revolution R on Debian Jessie.

Some precautions:

• On my system there is libjpeg8 as missing dependency. To avoid this, I installed from testing repository.

  1. I tried to install the package using gdebi to install and resolve all necessary dependencies.

  2. libjpeg8 is missing from stable repository, so I take it from testing repository, protecting other packages with pinning preferences:

     sudo printf "# testing\ndeb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
     
     sudo vim /etc/apt/preferences
     # old
     Package: *
     Pin: release o=Debian,a=stable
     Pin-Priority: 980
     
     Package: *
     Pin: release a=jessie-backports
     Pin-Priority: 900
     
     # new 
     Package: libjpeg8 
     Pin: release o=Debian,a=stretch 
     Pin-Priority: 990
     

  Note: The installed package is the libjpeg8:i386 version.

• the installation process of Revolution R erases the original R and Rscript executables, so in my opinion it's better backup them (as root or using sudo):

  sudo cp -i /usr/bin/Rscript /usr/bin/Rscript-original
  sudo cp -i /usr/bin/R /usr/bin/R-original
  

• Just in case you need to restore the original R and Rstudio executables without a backup, should be enough to reinstall the r-base-core package:

  sudo apt-get --reinstall install r-base-core -V
  

• using Revolution R with Rstudio should be fine. However if you would use a custom version of R (the original one, e.g.) with Rstudio it's possible to follow these instructions:

  export RSTUDIO_WHICH_R=/usr/bin/R-original
  echo "export RSTUDIO_WHICH_R=/usr/bin/R-original" >> ~/.profile
  source ~/.profile
  # logout and login again to use this profile also outside the bash