R has its own top level project in openSUSE's build service devel:languages:R.

R is included in the latest releases of openSUSE since 11.4, so it may be installed without adding any repositories directly from yast. Obviously you only get the version of R that was current, when a openSUSE release got frozen. I.e. 12.1 contains R-2.13.2 but we already have R-2.14.1 out by now. Read on to find out how to stay current with R!

Below devel.languages:R you find a few subprojects:

• R-base (built on release date)
• R-patched (daily, recommended) and
• R-devel (daily)

for all actively maintained releases of openSUSE available. For the time being these are: 11.3 and 12.1. Furthermore the adventurous can download packages for Factory and Tumbleweed. On the other end even SLE 10, 11 and 11SP1 are supported.

All these packages provide a resource 'R-base' for installation.

In subproject R-base you'll find the latest releases version of R. This is the version, which goes into the next openSUSE release. This project gets updates if and when R itself is officially released.

R-patched is updated daily with the latest patches from upstream. Same version number as R-base, but patches.

R-devel is updated daily and contains today's devel version of R.

Naturally R-patched now is the recommended version to run. If you compile packages for yourself you must install R-patched-devel, too. For discontinued releases, at the moment 10.1-11.3, R-base gets build as long as it "just works" with the current spec file. No effort is put in keeping the latest R-base build on these ancient releases.

The generic method to install R on OpenSUSE Linux is using the 1-click install facility the OpenSUSE Build Service (OBS) provides in their search interface. Nevertheless some seemed to have trouble using that interface, what inspired creating a page collecting direct links to the packages installation sources.

The links in the table below invoke yast2 directly to provide access to OpenSUSE's 1-click-install. Architecture and dependencies are handled automatically. You must be root to do this, resp. you will be asked to give the superuser password during installation. For maintained releases you'll receive current R-patched, otherwise R-base.

The devel package is needed, if you want to install add-on packages. You'll probably need to install a compiler, too. Some packages will need additional dependencies. See install instructions for the package, if an installation fails.

The version provided at the moment is R-2.14.1 (patched). This includes recommended packages.

As superuser do

zypper ar -f \
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel\:languages\:R\:patched/openSUSE_11.2\
R-patched

where you replace 11.2 with your release number. After that

zypper install R-patched R-patched-devel

will install R and all dependencies.

After the first installation the appropriate repositories have been added to your installation. Superuser may use

zypper update R-patched

to update to the latest version of R-patched from the command line.

To install R-devel just use the zypper command line with "patched" replaced by "devel". Using R-devel implies you know what you are doing.

If for whatever reason you prefer downloading and manual installation of R or you need a src.rpm and the spec file, using of the search interface is recommended.

These packages are maintained by Detlef Steuer (steuer@hsu-hh.de).