Condensed from this post (and comments) on David Chudzicki’s blog, tweaked, and updated for R-2.13.1.
Assumes you’re starting with a virgin “Amazon Linux” AMI. I picked “Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI 2011.02.1 Beta” (AMI Id: ami-8e1fece7) because it was marked as free tier eligible on the “Quick Start” tab of AWS’s “Launch Instance” dialog box:
$ sudo yum -y install make libX11-devel.* libICE-devel.* libSM-devel.* libdmx-devel.* libx* xorg-x11* libFS* libX* readline-devel gcc-gfortran gcc-c++ texinfo tetex $ wget http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-2/R-2.13.1.tar.gz $ tar zxf R-2.13.1.tar.gz && cd R-2.13.1 $ ./configure && make $ # make coffee... or finish your PhD thesis... (yes, it takes that long) [...] $ # finally, if all is well: $ sudo make install $ cd $ R --version R version 2.13.1 (2011-07-08) Copyright (C) 2011 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing ISBN 3-900051-07-0 Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit) R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. You are welcome to redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2. For more information about these matters see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
As always, refer to the Installation and Administration manual for details and options.
If you want to install RCurl, or anything which depends on it like twitteR, you’ll need to install libcurl & friends first:
$ sudo yum -y install libcurl libcurl-devel
Things I tend to forget 