Install Windows Subsytem for Linux from the Windows Store
In this post, I’ll describe how to install the WSL, configure it for R development, and share other tips and tricks. This finally convinced me that I should really switch over to primarily using the WSL. Recently I had some code that was taking minutes to run on Windows, so I tried it on the WSL, and it ran it in seconds. With RStudio and Git Bash, I’ve been productively developing on Windows for the past couple of months. 2 However, for one of my current freelance jobs, I was provided a Windows laptop. However, the most I’ve used it for real work was for speed benchmarking my R package workflowr. I’ve experimented with the WSL since early 2018 after David Smith provided instructions for installing R in the WSL and Jeroen Ooms announced that you can host RStudio Server and OpenCPU apps from the WSL. Finally with the WSL, using both Windows and Ubuntu is realistic. Only in the rare occasion that I had to use Adobe Illustrator would I boot into Windows. And while I productively used a dual-boot setup for years, I essentially only used Ubuntu during that time. 1 I’ve also dual-booted multiple machines, but I always found reformatting the hard drive to be a nerve-wracking and time-consuming experience. In the past, I’ve tried running Ubuntu in a virtual machine, but it was painfully slow, so much so that I never really used it for real work. It provides a convenient and smooth experience for running Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions) from Windows because the Linux executables are able to run natively on the Windows machine. The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is really impressive.
R, Rstudio, and Rcmdr are easy to install on a windows machine but what about linux, specifically Ubuntu 14.10 or Linux mint 17.1 on a 64 bit OS? First, install R using the terminal window with the following command: “sudo apt-get install r-base-dev” Next install Rstudio in the terminal window with the following commands: "sudo apt-get install gdebi-core" "sudo apt-get install libapparmor1" "wget " "sudo gdebi b" Luckily Rcommander a graphical interface for R has been developed and allows users to generate R codes for some of the most commonly used statistical tests and plots. Yet the learning curve in R is steep but worth using.
R studio is a professional software for R which is intuitive and user friendly. In case you are not aware, the R environment is an open source platform for statistical analysis, data manipulation, and among many other things. The equations are basic but I hope it may save someone some time. The formulas come from Gordon’s (2015) Regression Analysis for the Social Sciences 2 nd ed. I used Libreoffice 4.4.3.2 in Linux Mint 16.2 and the TexMaths ( ) extension to create these formulas. Recently I had to do a homework assignment using linear regression in OLS equations and LaTex.