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stackinator
Asked: 2018-06-23 05:40:57 +0800 CST

Broken Again - Unable to install R 3.5.0 in Ubuntu Bionic Beaver (18.04)

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This thread from @pineapple explains a previous issue where the user was unable to install R 3.5.0 in Ubuntu 18.04 using the following process:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran35/"
sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://cloud.r-project.org/ bionic-backports main restricted universe"
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E084DAB9
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install r-base r-base-dev

Pineapple added an update to the question stating, "UPDATE : The bug has been fixed by Michael Rutter and his Debian team. A big thanks to everyone involved.".

When I try and install R 3.5.0 on my Bionic Beaver box I get this string of errors after issuing the sudo apt-get update command. Is the issue truly solved? How do I solve it?

Err:10 https://cloud.r-project.org bionic-backports Release
404  Not Found [IP: 52.84.35.214 443]
Reading package lists... Done    
E: The repository 'https://cloud.r-project.org bionic-backports Release' 
does not have a Release file. 
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default. 
N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.
software-installation r 18.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Either the instructions you followed are wrong, or you made a mistake, in either case you did something that you shouldn't have.

    The second add-apt-repository command you entered is incorrect and wrong. bionic-backports is a software repository in the Ubuntu repositories, not the R Project cloud repository. This is the basis for that 404 error, so you will need to go into /etc/apt/sources.list and find where that line got added, and either remove that line or comment it out. (My suggestion is to just remove the line since it won't ever work)

    Further, the bionic-backports repository should already be enabled by default (but set to a lower priority than the rest of the repositories). You shouldn't have to do the add-apt-repository command at all. If a backported version of software is needed, then the R installer(s) should be referring to a version of the software in the backports repo, and should automatically get installed.

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