Fedora R Install
I’ve started building the new image for the database courses. This one needs to include Oracle, MySQL, Cassandra, Hive, and MongoDB databases; and include examples for C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, R programming languages.
Installing R was a surprise when I saw how many packages there are for it. It’s a standard yum command from the repository, but it will install 256 packages. The command is:
yum install -y R |
Once you install it, you simply start the R interpreter, which is part of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). Any installation of the R packages includes CRAN, but there are many additional libraries that you may install.
You can launch the R interpreter by typing the following at the Linux command-line:
R |
It will display the following licensing information and then the command prompt:
R version 3.2.0 (2015-04-16) -- "Full of Ingredients" Copyright (C) 2015 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit) R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details. Natural language support but running in an English locale R is a collaborative project with many contributors. Type 'contributors()' for more information and 'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications. Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or 'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help. Type 'q()' to quit R. |
You have two options for help. As qualified above, you can type help()
to get a Linux man
page, and q at the colon quits the man
page. Typing help.start()
launches a browser interface (shown below), which is more helpful.
You can discover your installed R packages with a call to the installed.packages()
function but the output lacks clarity and is verbose. You can see a formatted summary of your installed packages with the following command:
print(as.data.frame(installed.packages()[,c(1,3:4)]),row.names=FALSE) |
It should display the following:
Package Version Priority base 3.2.0 base boot 1.3-16 recommended class 7.3-12 recommended cluster 2.0.1 recommended codetools 0.2-11 recommended compiler 3.2.0 base datasets 3.2.0 base foreign 0.8-63 recommended graphics 3.2.0 base grDevices 3.2.0 base grid 3.2.0 base KernSmooth 2.23-14 recommended lattice 0.20-31 recommended MASS 7.3-40 recommended Matrix 1.2-0 recommended methods 3.2.0 base mgcv 1.8-6 recommended nlme 3.1-120 recommended nnet 7.3-9 recommended parallel 3.2.0 base rpart 4.1-9 recommended spatial 7.3-9 recommended splines 3.2.0 base stats 3.2.0 base stats4 3.2.0 base survival 2.38-1 recommended tcltk 3.2.0 base tools 3.2.0 base utils 3.2.0 base |
The print()
function allows us to remove the text-based indexes from display. The indexes would be the same as the package names. If you call frame()
function with a second argument of row.names=FALSE
, then R converts the text-based indexes to numeric indexes.
You can quit the R environment with the q()
or quit()
function calls. It will prompt you whether or not you want to save your workspace before you exit.
It’s time to play with R now. I hope this helps you get started by installing and playing with the R programming language.