A year on Debian

Inspired by other users seen on the Linux setup. I switched my work computer to Debian GNU/Linux in January 2015. I used the Jessie version which was "unstable" at the time. It became "stable" in april 2015 and I think the adjective is deserved. I'm happy.


I mostly use the R statistical software, the iceweasel web browser, the Lyx editor, the reference manager Jabref and the Evolution mail and calendar program. I learned a lot by using git (file revision system) and databases through the command line. I sometimes use vim to edit text files and I use the RStudio editor in Vim mode. I also use the Libre office Calc, Writer and Draw software.

As long as you stick with what is in the huge Debian package repository, software updates are easy. If you need programs updated very recently (in the last months), installation can become tricky. Although it mostly involves adding new software repositories or installing .deb files directly. For example I managed to install the proprietary statistical software STATA.

R packages installation on Debian Jessie

This morning I wanted to install packagedocs to produce web documentation for a package. Packagedocs is based on staticdocs. They required an upgrade to R >= 3.2.0.

Installing R 3.2.3

Based on Debian packages for R software, I added this line to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://cran.univ-paris1.fr/bin/linux/debian jessie-cran3/

Reloaded package information in the synaptic package manager, marked all upgrades and installed the package.

Installing packages

Some packages can be installed from the CRAN repository

install.packages("Rcpp")
install.packages("ggplot2")
install.packages(c("dplyr","tidyr"))
install.packages("ggplot2")
install.packages(c("dplyr","tidyr")

Other packages are not available on CRAN. They can be installed from github:

devtools::install_github("hadley/staticdocs")
devtools::install_github("hafen/packagedocs")

See also my older post on R packages and RStudio install on Debian Wheezy.