Installing R-Studio on Ubuntu 16.10

Installing things on Linux is either really easy, or a yak shave with surprisingly little between those extremes.

It seems that Ubuntu 16.10 has removed Gstreamer 0.10 from the repos and replaced it with Gstreamer 1.0, which is great… until you need to install R-Studio.

While the R-Studio people are aiming to drop the Gstreamer dependency, for the moment, as of 16.10, installing it has fallen into the yak-shave category.

Installing R-Studio works fine, but if you try to run (from the terminal) it you will get the error:

rstudio: error while loading shared libraries: libgstreamer-0.10.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

We can see that it’s failing to load Gstreamer, but since it’s been removed from the Ubuntu repos fixing this will mean getting those packages elsewhere.

To start with, we can download the latest R-studio daily build and install it using dpkg:

$ wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/rstudio-dailybuilds/rstudio-1.0.124-amd64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i rstudio-1.0.124-amd64.deb

The dpkg command can also query the package to display information about it. If we use the uppercase I option we can confirm that this package requires exactly version 0.10 of libgstreamer:

dpkg -I rstudio-1.0.124-amd64.deb 
 new debian package, version 2.0.
 size 98840122 bytes: control archive=42847 bytes.
     554 bytes,    12 lines      control              
  163246 bytes,  1548 lines      md5sums              
     198 bytes,    10 lines   *  postinst             #!/bin/sh
     158 bytes,    10 lines   *  postrm               #!/bin/sh
 Package: rstudio
 Version: 1.0.124
 Section: devel
 Priority: optional
 Architecture: amd64
 Depends: libjpeg62, libedit2, libgstreamer0.10-0, libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0, libssl1.0.0,  libc6 (>= 2.7)
 Recommends: r-base (>= 2.11.1)
 Installed-Size: 526019
 Maintainer: RStudio <info@rstudio.com>
 Description: RStudio
  RStudio is a set of integrated tools designed to help you be more productive with R. It includes a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution, as well as tools for plotting, history, and workspace management.

Debian (which Ubuntu is based on) has the old Gstreamer packages we need to satisfy those dependencies, so we can get them from there. If you need something other than the AMD64 see here and here. The if you have a 64bit machine, you can download and install like this:

# download with wget
$ wget http://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gstreamer0.10/libgstreamer0.10-0_0.10.36-1.5_amd64.deb
$ wget http://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gst-plugins-base0.10/libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0_0.10.36-2_amd64.deb

# Now install with dpkg
$ sudo dpkg -i libgstreamer0.10-0_0.10.36-1.5_amd64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0_0.10.36-2_amd64.deb

While that solves R’s problems, we now have one of our own. We’ve purposefully installed old packages and don’t want Ubuntu’s package manager to enthusiastically upgrade them next time we update.
To resolve that problem will put a hold on them with apt-mark:

$ sudo apt-mark hold libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0
libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 set on hold.
$ sudo apt-mark hold libgstreamer0.10
libgstreamer0.10-0 set on hold.

And we can check the packages that are on hold with:

$ sudo apt-mark showhold
libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0
libgstreamer0.10-0

Hopefully that saves someone some Googling.
Now that’s working, it’s time to play with some R!