Trying to get Tidyverse installed in Linux mint 20.2

Question

I've been working on getting RStudio to open on and off for the last few days, finally got it running and started installing packages. Readr installed fine but tidyverse refuses to install.

/usr/bin/ld: /usr/local/lib/libcrypto.a(v3_genn.o): relocation R_X86_64_PC32 against symbol `GENERAL_NAME_it' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
/usr/bin/ld: final link failed: bad value
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [/usr/share/R/share/make/shlib.mk:6: openssl.so] Error 1
ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘openssl’
* removing ‘/home/william/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.6/openssl’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘openssl’ had non-zero exit status
ERROR: dependency ‘openssl’ is not available for package ‘ids’
* removing ‘/home/william/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.6/ids’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘ids’ had non-zero exit status
ERROR: dependency ‘openssl’ is not available for package ‘httr’
* removing ‘/home/william/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.6/httr’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘httr’ had non-zero exit status
ERROR: dependency ‘httr’ is not available for package ‘gargle’
* removing ‘/home/william/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.6/gargle’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘gargle’ had non-zero exit status
ERROR: dependency ‘httr’ is not available for package ‘rvest’
* removing ‘/home/william/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.6/rvest’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘rvest’ had non-zero exit status
ERROR: dependencies ‘gargle’, ‘httr’ are not available for package ‘googledrive’
* removing ‘/home/william/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.6/googledrive’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘googledrive’ had non-zero exit status
ERROR: dependencies ‘gargle’, ‘googledrive’, ‘httr’, ‘ids’ are not available for package ‘googlesheets4’
* removing ‘/home/william/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.6/googlesheets4’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘googlesheets4’ had non-zero exit status
ERROR: dependencies ‘googledrive’, ‘googlesheets4’, ‘httr’, ‘rvest’ are not available for package ‘tidyverse’
* removing ‘/home/william/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.6/tidyverse’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘tidyverse’ had non-zero exit status

The downloaded source packages are in
    ‘/tmp/RtmpyoCTNu/downloaded_packages’

To fix this I've tried suggestions from two places:

The first option was 'sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev'

from this website: https://blog.zenggyu.com/en/post/2018-01-29/installing-r-r-packages-e-g-tidyverse-and-rstudio-on-ubuntu-linux/

The second this was 'sudo apt-get install r-base-dev xml2 libxml2-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev unixodbc-dev'

from the rstudio community page: https://community.rstudio.com/t/cant-install-tidyverse/29293

A third option I found that is too advanced for me without guidance is this: If openssl is already installed, check that 'pkg-config' is in your PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH contains a openssl.pc file. If pkg-config is unavailable you can set INCLUDE_DIR and LIB_DIR manually via: R CMD INSTALL --configure-vars='INCLUDE_DIR=... LIB_DIR=...'

I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. I think something may not be in the proper place or is linked to the wrong location. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

(Also,for reference, this is the first time I've used linux so please dumb answers down as much as possible)

Answer 1

I've now gotten this to work. By looking at the error messages I found the dependencies that need to be installed before tidyverse can be installed (and function).

It is preferable but not necessary to get the latest version of R installed. I followed the steps in this tutorial: https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-rstudio-on-ubuntu-20-04-focal-fossa-linux

In the interest of putting everything in one place, I'll put the steps here:

Step 1:

$ sudo apt update

$ sudo apt -y install r-base gdebi-core

Step 2: Install Rstudio from their website

Step 3: For this step, make sure you're in the folder that has the file downloaded, for me that was in downloads

$ sudo gdebi rstudio-1.2.5019-amd64.deb

Step 4: Open Rstudio

To get tidyverse to work, my error messages were all about non-zero exit statuses. What I did was to go through, find the packages that weren't properly installing, and manually install them.

My first problem was with curl. I tried installing it in Rstudio first. When I got an error, I went into terminal and installed it with

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

If openssl refuses to install try:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

I tried installing tidyverse again, no dice. It was still having trouble with xml2 and rvest. I installed xml2 in terminal with.

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev

After that, rvest installed using Rstudio and tidyverse installed successfully.

These instructions work with both R 4.1.1 and R 3.4.4

Answer 2

It would seem that the R version here is quite old, version 3.6. A bunch of things that are tidyverse related broke around the switch from 3.* to 4.*.

If you follow a procedure like this, it should get you started on the right path with the proper R version and the rest will likely fall into place.

https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-r-on-ubuntu-20-04/

Occasionally, on linux machines, you will have packages that fail to install because of system level dependencies that are missing. Those messages are usually informative; they will tell you what you need and the command for acquiring it.