Monday, December 15, 2008

How to get the BioConductor packages to install correctly in Ubuntu 8.10

Apparently, the repositories for the 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) release of Ubuntu do not completely specify all of the dependencies for the R-base synaptic package.

I could not get various packages to compile, until I installed

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libatlas-base-dev

This solved many build problems, including package XML, but I was still getting the following error when attempting to load library vsn:

> library(vsn)
Loading required package: lattice
Loading required package: Biobase
Loading required package: tools

Welcome to Bioconductor

Vignettes contain introductory material. To view, type
'openVignette()'. To cite Bioconductor, see
'citation("Biobase")' and for packages 'citation(pkgname)'.

Loading required package: affy
Loading required package: affyio
Loading required package: preprocessCore
Loading required package: limma
Error in inherits(x, "factor") : attempt to apply non-function
Error : .onLoad failed in 'loadNamespace' for 'vsn'
Error: package/namespace load failed for 'vsn'

Got it to work finally! I replaced the atlas lib mentioned above with libatlas3gf-sse2 (specific for newer processors) and also updated all of my bioconductor packages as follows:
source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
update.packages(repos=biocinstallRepos(), ask=FALSE)

-----------
references:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-December/181390.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=717069