cran2deb4ubuntu (or c2d4u) was inspired by cran2deb, a project for automatically converting CRAN packages for R into Debian packages. c2d4u is a similar project whose goal is create a similar repository for Ubuntu. There are a couple of key differences:

• Rather attempt to create all 5000+ packages in CRAN, c2d4u only focuses on those packages listed in the CRAN Task Views. Currently, the repository has approximately 1158 binary packages for the Ubuntu release Precise (12.04), Oneiric (11.10) and Natty (11.04).
• As opposed to using a dedicated machine to build the packages for c2d4u, a Launchpad PPA is used to build the binary packages.

The PPA is named c2d4u and can be easily added to your Ubuntu system. Note, you will need to add the RutteR PPA that contains R and the recommended packages as well.

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:marutter/rrutter sudo add-apt-repository ppa:marutter/c2d4u sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install r-cran-foo 

All of the packages follow the r-cran-foo convention, and in all lowercase. For example, to install the R2jags package, you would enter

 sudo apt-get install r-cran-r2jags 

The repository is usually updated twice a week. Some packages, Rgeos for example, have proven difficult to build on Launchpad, and work is ongoing to get as many packages as possible on c2d4u. If you know of a package listed on CRAN Task Views that is not on c2d4u, please contact the maintainer Michael Rutter.

If you have any questions about the c2d4u repository, please email the maintainer Michael Rutter.

To Do List

• Create web-pages of all the packages currently available, recently updated, and blacklisted. Some of this information can be found at the PPA page, but is not in a user-friendly format.
• Release details on how to send packages to the PPA given a locally available source repository.