Installing from Source

On Linux or other UNIX-based machines (probably including Mac OS X), you can also compile R’s source code yourself. Simply unpack the source archive and follow the classic three-command installation procedure:

$ configure
$ make
$ make install

Note that you may need to run make install as root, depending on your write permissions and the location to which you’re installing R. If you want to install to a nonstandard directory, say /a/b/c, you can run configure with the --prefix parameter, like this:

$ configure --prefix=/a/b/c

This might be helpful if you’re working on a shared machine and don’t have write permissions to the standard installation directories like /usr.