HowTo build Rstudio on OrangePI PC

If you haven’t tested yet the new OrangePI PC released here, a distro with ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet build is waiting for you to test his new features. Today, to inaugurate the first blog-post of ctrlfagency, I have decided to start by sharing you a tutorial regarding the build of the IDE Rstudio.  Rstudio is the software that will make you like math, statistics, probabilities, and Risk Management.

Features of Rstudio

• Access RStudio locally
• Syntax highlighting, code completion, and smart indentation
• Execute R code directly from the source editor
• Quickly jump to function definitions
• Easily manage multiple working directories using projects
• Integrated R help and documentation
• Interactive debugger to diagnose and fix errors quickly
• Extensive package development tools

R is a software distributed under AGPL License that permit to introduce you with Science and computing. R fit to all people from children to the oldest, and has a wide scientist community that use it (More than the google’s tensorflow project). This tutorial is the first of a long series. If you look at the internet for a tutorial on how to build Rstudio on OrangePi PC , you may fall into general misunderstanding because there are not actually existing tutorials about it.

Create a swap space

To get started we need to create a swap space on the orangePI in order to avoid your build’s cmake to stop during the install because of a lack of memory. We have the choice to create a single file to “host” our swap or to create a swap partition with fdisk or gparted… I have choosen to create a 1Gb swap space on a single file at the root of my filesystem.

cd / &&  sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile && chmod 600 swapfile && ls -lh swapfile && sudo mkswap swapfile && sudo swapon /swapfile && sudo swapon -s

Now we edit the fstab file to make our changes permanent :

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add the lines at the bottom of the file :

/swapfile   none    swap    sw    0   0

Save – ctrl+o And ctrl+x to quit
We can make it more effective by doing this :

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10
sudo sysctl vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

Making theses changes permanent :

nano /etc/sysctl.conf

And add the lines at the top of the file :

sysctl vm.swappiness=10
sysctl vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

Our swap space is created.

Install Java Developper Kit 8

Add webvupd8team repository :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update

And install the package :

sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

We could install Openjdk8 instead of the non-Free version :

sudo apt-get install -y openjdk-8-jdk

Build Rstudio

Download the latest ARM version of Rstudio and extract it to you folder.

wget https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/tarball/v0.98.982 && tar zxvf v0.98.982

Download and exrtact the updated compiler for gwt.

wget http://dl.google.com/closure-compiler/compiler-latest.zip && unzip compiler-latest.zip

Download the dependencies :

sudo apt-get install -y install build-essential pkg-config fakeroot cmake uuid-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev zlib1g-dev libpam-dev libboost-all-dev libpango1.0-dev ant pandoc qt-sdk

Replace the compiler.jar by the new one downloaded previously.

cp compiler.jar rstudio-rstudio-f8f2683/src/gwt/tools/compiler/compiler.jar

Install common dependencies :

cd rstudio-rstudio-f8f2683/dependencies/common/ && ./install-gwt && ./install-dictionaries && ./install-mathjax && ./install-boost && ./install-packages

Wait a while…
Make the build..

cd ../../ && sudo cmake -D RSTUDIO_TARGET=Desktop -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && sudo make install

Remove the building dependencies.

sudo apt-get autoremove openjdk-8-jdk pandoc libboost-all-dev && cd .. && rm -rf rstudio* && apt-get autoremove

That’s all folks !

External links

• Shell script for Rstudio ARM on chromebooks here
• Building Rstudio on linux ARM here
• Install Java 8 here