Linux3

Starting to administer systems

Installing Software

Building from Source Code

Let's build the latest and greatest version of the popular, open-source statistics package--R. We can download the source code from a mirror site right here in Bristol!

cd $HOME
mkdir BUILD
mkdir INSTALL
cd BUILD
mkdir R
cd R
wget http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/src/base/R-3/R-3.0.1.tar.gz

OK, take a look at what we have so far:

ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 gethin gethin 25508280 2013-05-16 08:11 R-3.0.1.tar.gz

So far, so good. Let's unpack the tarball:

tar -xzf R-3.0.1.tar.gz
ls -l
drwxr-xr-x 10 gethin gethin     4096 2013-05-16 08:11 R-3.0.1
-rw-r--r--  1 gethin gethin 25508280 2013-05-16 08:11 R-3.0.1.tar.gz

We have a directory called R-3.0.1, let's move into that directory and start the build process.

cd R-3.0.1