Installing R Packages Error in readRDS(file) : error reading from connection

Question

Whenever I try to install any package in R on Ubuntu 14.04, I\'m getting the following error:

Error in readRDS(file) : error reading from connection
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Answer 1

I had this error on Windows 10 after installing R 3.4.0 from 3.3.1 (all 64-bit). It was resolved by manually installing an unrelated package from CRAN (I used ggplot2). No idea what the root cause was, but perhaps this will work for you as well.

Output from my code:

> library(pacman)
> p_load(plyr, XLConnect, ggplot2, stringr, magrittr, kirkegaard, lubridate, weights, psych, psychometric, polycor, effsize, readr)
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/Emil/Documents/R/win-library/3.4’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Error in install.packages : error reading from connection
 Error in loadNamespace(name) : there is no package called ‘BiocInstaller’ 

Then I restarted R, and ran the same code:

> library(pacman)
> p_load(plyr, XLConnect, ggplot2, stringr, magrittr, kirkegaard, lubridate, weights, psych, psychometric, polycor, effsize, readr)
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/Emil/Documents/R/win-library/3.4’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Error in readRDS(dest) : error reading from connection

I.e. same code, different error. Odd. Then I restarted R again and installed a random package, then reran my code and it worked.

> install.packages("ggplot2")
Warning in install.packages :
  cannot open URL 'http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin/src/contrib/PACKAGES.rds': HTTP status was '404 Not Found'
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/Emil/Documents/R/win-library/3.4’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Warning in install.packages :
  cannot open URL 'http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin/bin/windows/contrib/3.4/PACKAGES.rds': HTTP status was '404 Not Found'
trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/3.4/ggplot2_2.2.1.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 2782171 bytes (2.7 MB)
downloaded 2.7 MB

package ‘ggplot2’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

The downloaded binary packages are in
    C:\Users\Emil\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpCq4cFX\downloaded_packages
> library(pacman)
> p_load(plyr, XLConnect, ggplot2, stringr, magrittr, kirkegaard, lubridate, weights, psych, psychometric, polycor, effsize, readr)
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/Emil/Documents/R/win-library/3.4’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/3.4/effsize_0.7.1.zip'
Content type 'application/zip' length 36713 bytes (35 KB)
downloaded 35 KB

package ‘effsize’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked

The downloaded binary packages are in
    C:\Users\Emil\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpCq4cFX\downloaded_packages

effsize installed

So, error seems to have had something to do with pacman trying to install effsize.