Cannot install e1071 on RStudio Server on Ubuntu

Question

I am trying to install the e1071 package on a RStudio Server that I am accessing through a web browser. Here is the error I get:

> install.packages("e1071")
Installing package(s) into ‘/home/mc/R/library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'http://cran.nexr.com/src/contrib/e1071_1.6-1.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 258910 bytes (252 Kb)
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 252 Kb


The downloaded source packages are in
    ‘/tmp/Rtmp3a2DZB/downloaded_packages’
Error in system(paste(which, i), intern = TRUE, ignore.stderr = TRUE) : 
  cannot popen '/usr/bin/which pdflatex 2>/dev/null', probable reason 'Cannot allocate memory'

Sometimes when I try this, I don't get the error message but the e1071 package still doesn't appear in the package list.

Here is my sessionInfo()

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.2 (2012-10-26)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C         LC_TIME=C           
 [4] LC_COLLATE=C         LC_MONETARY=C        LC_MESSAGES=C       
 [7] LC_PAPER=C           LC_NAME=C            LC_ADDRESS=C        
[10] LC_TELEPHONE=C       LC_MEASUREMENT=C     LC_IDENTIFICATION=C 

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] caret_5.15-045  cluster_1.14.3  reshape_0.8.4   plyr_1.8       
[5] lattice_0.20-10 doMC_1.2.5      multicore_0.1-7 iterators_1.0.6
[9] foreach_1.4.0  

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] codetools_0.2-8 grid_2.15.2     tools_2.15.2   

Can somebody help? Thank you.

Answer 1

Maybe you can restart your RStudio Server, by

sudo rstudio-server restart

Answer 2

Please note that you can just do

sudo apt-get install r-cran-e1071

Apart from that your error could indicate lack of resources, possibly RAM and possibly also lack of r-base-dev which you want to install before locally building packages.

Edit: I stand corrected. This once existed as a package, but appears to have been withdrawn later. It is however still in Michael's ppa.