Microsoft R Open 4.0.2 and openSuSE

Sep 26, 2020 · Last updated on Jan 16, 2022 2 min read R
Photo by Musiime P. Muramura on Unsplash

One reason for my sometimes growing respect for Microsoft is that they support (just) Microsoft R Open. Back in May 2019 they released version 3.5.3. It was a long time coming, but Microsoft released Microsoft R Open 4.0.2 in September 2020.

In the nick-of-time, really. Theresa Graefe’s RTutor tutorial on synthetic models appears to rely on at least version 3.6 of R.

Microsoft R Open 4.0.2 and openSuSE Leap 15.2

I mainly use Microsoft R on Windows, but Linux has once again become my ‘daily driver’ for home use. Microsoft R Open does support SuSE Linux Enterprise SLES installation. To install on openSuSE Leap 15.2, I needed to change line 109 of the install.sh to:

  elif  [ "$OS_NAME" == "openSUSE" ]; then

Microsoft R Open CRAN snapshots

Normally, I think snapshots are a good idea to ease maintenance (though it would be more usable if Microsoft had a more regular update cycle…).

For some reason, the default CRAN mirror isn’t quite working the way it should be.

RevoUtils::getRevoRepos() returns "https://mran.microsoft.com/snapshot/2020-07-16".

but…

> install.packages("tidyverse")
Warning in install.packages :  
  unable to access index for repository https://mran.microsoft.com/snapshot/2020-07-16/src/contrib:  
  Line starting '<head><title>Documen ...' is malformed!

The problem can be ‘fixed’ manually after R starts with the commands:

r <- getOption("repos")
r["CRAN"] <- "https://cran.microsoft.com/snapshot/2020-07-16"
options(repos = r)

but a more permanent fix is by modifying line 23 of /opt/microsoft/ropen/4.0.2/lib64/R/etc/Rprofile.site.

 r["CRAN"] <- "https://cran.microsoft.com/snapshot/2020-07-16" # RevoUtils::getRevoRepos()
R Microsoft R Open 4.0.2 openSuSE Leap 15.2
David Fong
David Fong
Lead doctor, Kensington site, coHealth

My interests include sustainable development in low-resource populations, teaching and the uses of monitoring and evaluation in clinical practice.

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