Install R on RedHat errors on dependencies that don't exist

Question

I have installed R before on a machine running RedHat EL6.5, but I recently had a problem installing new packages (i.e. install.packages()). Since I couldn't find a solution to this, I tried reinstalling R using:

sudo yum remove R

and

sudo yum install R

But now I get:

....
---> Package R-core-devel.x86_64 0:3.1.0-5.el6 will be installed
--> Processing Dependency: blas-devel >= 3.0 for package: R-core-devel-3.1.0-5.el6.x86_64
--> Processing Dependency: libicu-devel for package: R-core-devel-3.1.0-5.el6.x86_64
--> Processing Dependency: lapack-devel for package: R-core-devel-3.1.0-5.el6.x86_64
---> Package xz-devel.x86_64 0:4.999.9-0.3.beta.20091007git.el6 will be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Error: Package: R-core-devel-3.1.0-5.el6.x86_64 (epel)
           Requires: blas-devel >= 3.0
Error: Package: R-core-devel-3.1.0-5.el6.x86_64 (epel)
       Requires: lapack-devel
Error: Package: R-core-devel-3.1.0-5.el6.x86_64 (epel)
       Requires: libicu-devel
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

I already checked, and blas-devel is installed, but the newest version is 0.2.8. Checked using:

yum info openblas-devel.x86_64

Any thoughts as to what is going wrong? Thanks.

Solution 1

I had the same issue. Not sure why these packages are missing from RHEL's repos, but they are in CentOS 6.5, so the follow solution works, if you want to keep things in the package paradigm:

wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/x86_64/Packages/lapack-devel-3.2.1-4.el6.x86_64.rpm
wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/x86_64/Packages/blas-devel-3.2.1-4.el6.x86_64.rpm
wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/x86_64/Packages/texinfo-tex-4.13a-8.el6.x86_64.rpm
wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/os/x86_64/Packages/libicu-devel-4.2.1-9.1.el6_2.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall *.rpm

cheers

---

UPDATE: Leon's answer is better -- see below.

Solution 2

Do the following:

1. vim /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat.repo
2. Change enabled = 0 in [rhel-6-server-optional-rpms] section of the file to enabled=1
3. yum install R

DONE!

I think I should give reference to the site of solution:

https://bluehatrecord.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/installing-r-on-red-hat-enterprise-linux-6-5/

Solution 3

The best solution I could come up with was to install from source. This worked and was not too bad. However, now it isn't in my package manager.

Comments

[DavidJ]

When installing texinfo-tex-5.1-4.el7.x86_654, it complains about requiring tex(epsd.tex), but I've no idea which package supplies that. This is on RHEL7, obviously (and using CentOS7 packages).

[Owen]

Are you trying to install using rpm or yum? yum should attempt to resolve dependencies.

[DavidJ]

It was yum complaining. Adding the analogous CentOS repo to /etc/yum.repos.d temporarily and then installing just the missing dependencies, then removing it and installing R fixed the issue. It is apparently a issue/bug with the RHEL package dependencies. I had to be careful to ensure the all other packages came from the RHEL repos, not CentOS, hence not a good idea to install R itself when the CentOS repo is active.

[Owen]

Glad you figured it out. When I stumbled on this last year I was also surprised that the Centos repos seemed more complete than RHEL.

[Dave X]

Works for RHEL7 with [rhel-7-server-optional-rpms] change too.

[Dave X]

They are in the RHEL optional RPMs. See Leon's answer.