I have been using R recently. R is statistics programming language. R has attracted more and more attention as analytics in cloud gets more and more hot. Don't install R in default ubuntu source which only contains a older version. Update apt source according to http://ftp.ctex.org/mirrors/CRAN/. For example, I added the following line to /etc/apt/source.list deb http://bibs.snu.ac.kr/R/bin/linux/ubuntu jaunty/ Follow the instructions from here sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list This will open up your sources.list file in gedit , where you can add the following line. deb http://cran.cnr.berkeley