Is it impossible to install R 4.0 on Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS because r-base-core requires a libc6 version >= 2.29?

Question

I am trying to install R 4.0 on Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS but I keep getting errors of

> sudo apt install r-base-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building depende         


        

Answer 1

Question: Is your system otherwise current to 18.04? If so, the upgrade should just work. I wrote a blog post (prior to the release) about testing R 4.0.0 on 18.04 along with a video:

• blog post http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2020/04/11#024_rocker_r_4_0_0_testing
• slides with links http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/papers/r4_r400_binaries.pdf
• video showing the upgrade https://youtu.be/aa9lZJ7ZzKM

Two more recent (related) posts at http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/code/r4/ as well.

In short, on a system that is otherwise well (i.e. no other packages forced or conflicts or what have you), one just adds the new repo (shown in slides and video), updates the apt index and upgrades. I have done the same for my 19.10 Ubuntu system in another video.

Answer 2

Yes. It may be a bug in that specific package/version but you should upgrade to a newer Ubuntu version if you wish to use that package.

Upgrading Ubuntu is achieved using the command sudo do-release-upgrade. This assumes your user is authorised to run root/administrative commands. More detail may be found on the Ubuntu community site.

If waiting for a fix or upgrading aren't palatable, you may find running R in a Docker container is a better solution. This is an increasingly common method for running awkward development tools.

• An introduction may be found here: https://colinfay.me/docker-r-reproducibility/
• The Docker equivalent of the package you noted is here: https://hub.docker.com/_/r-base

Answer 3

I am using Ubuntu 18.04, for this there should be a single source deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran40/ in /etc/apt/sources.list Unfortunately, I added deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu focal-cran40/ by mistake which I removed to install R 4.0 R is successfully installed now.

Answer 4

The problem may to be with your /etc/apt/sources.list. Please check whether you have disabled all other repositories for R in there, e.g. it should not contain lines like deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran35/