R doc dir (/usr/local/lib64/R/doc) not found.

RStudio IDE
#1

I think (!!!) I have managed to install R studio. I downloaded the "deb" file and then executed

sudo apt install ./rstudio-1.4.1717-amd64.deb

I then found "Rstudio" in Applications -> Programming in my Mate desktop. When I clicked on "Rstudio" I got the message

R doc dir (/usr/local/lib64/R/doc) not found.

And indeed it is not there.

I should add that /usr/local/lib64/R is a symbolic link to /usr/lib/R.

The latter is where R seems to get installed on my system; the former seems to be where Rstudio wants it to be installed. Initially when I tried to start Rstudio after installing it, I got the complaint that it couldn't find R, so I created the symbolic link.

Anyway, there seems not to be a "docs" directory in my installation of R, and Rstudio demands that there be one. What can I do?

#2

This is really an addendum to my original post, to the effect that I have (in some sense) solved the problem. I also asked about the problem on the R-help mailing list and got a useful reply to the effect that Rstudio requires its own purpose-specific binaries.

I was always under the impression that Rstudio would run whatever instance of R that the user had installed, but this seems not to be the case. My respondent on R-help pointed me at instructions for installing R in such a way as to satisfy Rstudio.
I had seen no such instructions elsewhere.

After considerable travail I managed to effect this installation,
which put R into /opt/R/4.1.0 and lo and behold
/opt/R/4.1.0/lib/R does indeed contain a "doc" directory
(unlike, e.g. /usr/lib/R which is my non-Rstudio instance of R lives.)

Having done that and having made the appropriate symbolic links, I was able to click on the Rstudio icon under
Applications -> Programming and get Rstudio running.

So far I can find no way to get Rstudio to do what I had hoped to be able to do --- something that cannot effectively be done in raw R. But that's another story.

Let me end by saying that I was disappointed by the deafening silence with which my original post was met. Were it not for the R-help mailling list I would still be completely in the dark.

#3

You posted a question on a Sunday about a subject (a Linux variant installation) which few people will have encountered and complained early on a Monday before the vast majority of the community will have even switched on their PCs.

Your expectations are a bit too high.

#4

My expectations have been shaped by many, many years of experience with the R-help mailing list (from which I got seven or eight replies on this same issue over the same time period). See
fortunes::fortune(124).

#5

I suspect there are far more people checking in on a Sunday on the mail list and also more Linux desktop users.

Along with SO there are (at least) three major means of getting help, but they have different communities.

#6

Well i replied on the R-help list so did not reply here.

#7

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