2.1 Install R

20260820

On 01 September 2026 the R version was 4.6.1. See the R NEWS for details.

To install R on Ubuntu see Section 2.2. To install R on macOS see Section 2.3. To install R on Windows see Section 2.4.

Summary

The generic instructions are:

  1. Visit https://cloud.r-project.org/
  2. Choose Download R for either Linux, macOS or Windows
  3. Install the downloaded R.
  4. Start up R (e.g., type R into a terminal) to get R’s > prompt
  5. Install the R packages used by Rattle by pasting these commands at the R prompt:
install.packages(c("BiocManager", "Ckmeans.1d.dp", "Hmisc", "NeuralNetTools", "ROCR",
                   "SnowballC", "VIM",
                   "ada", "amap", "arules", "arulesViz",
                   "caret", "corrplot", "descr", "devtools",
                   "fBasics", "ggcorrplot", "ggdendro", "ggplotify",
                   "ggtext", "ggthemes",
                   "janitor", "lubridate",
                   "magrittr", "mice",
                   "naniar", "neuralnet", "nnet", "party", "partykit",
                   "randomForest", "rattle",
                   "readr", "reshape", "rpart", "skimr", "tidyverse", "tm",
                   "verification", "wordcloud", "wskm", "xgboost"))
BiocManager::install("Rgraphviz")
devtools::install_github("bmschmidt/wordVectors")

Details

We first need to have available the computer software that interprets our programs that we write as sentences in the R language. Usually we will install this software, called the R Interpreter, on our own computer and instructions for doing so are readily available on the Internet. The R Project is a good place to start.

Generally, to install R visit the R Download page of the R Project. Choose your operating system variety and click the appropriate link on that page.

The comprehensive R archive network (CRAN) hosts over 5,000 R packages available for any installation of R. For macOS and Windows the packages are available for direct installation. On GNU/Linux the packages generally need to be built before they are installed. Either way we use R’s install.packages() command to install any one of these 5,000 packages.

Rattle utilises a large collection of R packages for a multitude of different purposes. These can be installed before you install Rattle with the install.pacakges() command that you enter into the terminal running the R prompt >.

When you are installing the R pacakges you may be asked to create a personal library for your R packages. Do so. To then quit from R type q() at the R prompt (and choose n when asked to save the workspace image).

Once you have R and the required packages installed proceed to Section 2.5 to install Rattle in general or proceed to one of the operating specific pages for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

You can check that a package has been properly installed by loading one of the packages from the R library. For example, to check the rattle package has been installed, try:

library(rattle)

Generally you will not see any output or error messages if all is installed properly.


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