Installation

Pre-requisites

You must be running the official Raspberry Pi OS (previously called Raspbian) or Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) on your system and it must be up to date.

Technically, the software should work on all versions of the Pi, however due to memory constraints with older versions and the Pi Zero, we recommend at least a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB or more of RAM.

You can check your Raspberry Pi model in a terminal with:

cat /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/model;echo

You are, of course, welcome to run the software on any Raspberry Pi, but you should expect poor performance on systems with low memory.

About the r4pi R build

Our build of R tracks the R Project's current "release" version.

This is essentially the latest version of R available

Setting things up

Before you can install the r4pi build of R, you need to configure access to the r4pi.org software repository.

source /etc/os-release
curl -O  https://pkgs.r4pi.org/dl/${VERSION_CODENAME}/r4pi-repo-conf_0.0.1-1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i  r4pi-repo-conf_0.0.1-1_all.deb
sudo apt update

You're now ready to install our build of R.

Installing the software

Now that you've configured your system, you can go ahead and install the software.

First update all your sources:

sudo apt update

You should see the new r4pi.org source in the output somewhere.

Next, install any updates that are available, note that this can take some time.

sudo apt upgrade

Finally, install the r4pi build of R.

sudo apt install r4pi

Assuming that's successful, you're now ready to start using R.

You can start R by running:

Type ctrl+d twice to exit.