I recently had the fun of installing R on my development box. While you can install from source I wanted to be able to install using yum. R is not in the standard packages, but it is in the epel repository (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 – x86_64).
Steps for Installing R
1. Make sure that you have epel in your yum repositories (use yum listrepo to check). If not add epel to your yum repos (see here for instructions how to do this).
2. Install R and dependencies using yum install R-core R-2*
3. Enter R (just type R) and update all the default package using update.packages(). You will need to choose the nearest mirror to you.
4. Install the packages you need using install.packages(“package_name”, dependencies = TRUE)
5. Quit R using q()
Hope this saves someone a little time.
Update.
If you are behind a proxy server then use the following (change for your proxy setting) after starting R
Sys.setenv(http_proxy=”http://url_to_proxy.com:8080″)
You can check if correct by
Sys.getenv(“http_proxy”)
then update by
update.packages()