I've installed R in Ubuntu Lucid with the command
sudo aptitude install r-base
When I try to "install.packages" it seems to download source and then spend ages compiling it. How can I get it to just download and install the binaries, like I'm used to on Windows?
Is there any need to compile the packages myself? I'm running inside a VM so it would be great to keep things as slim as possible.
Thanks
CRAN packages are available in the Ubuntu package repository, but are updated with CRAN only when Ubuntu is updated. If you want to use the latest CRAN version of a package and the repository is not at the same version, you will need to go through the compilation/installation procedure.
Details in the Ubuntu R packages can be found on CRAN, which should give you all the information you require.
As this (the provision of binaries) is all volunteer effort on the part of the CRAN maintainers, R Core and other devoted members of the community (e.g. Dirk, Vincent and Michael for the Debian and Ubuntu packages), the main effort has gone into providing binaries for systems where self-compilation is more difficult as the necessary tools are not easily available, unlike on Linux.
CRAN only distributes source for Unix, in other words no binaries are offered (unlike for Windows). So you simply have to compile the packages locally.
That said, we have been working for a few years now on a system to turn CRAN source packages into Debian binary packages -- see cran2deb / debian.cran.r-project.org. We currently build i386 binaries for Debian testing and are in the process of rewriting the backend to offer amd64 for Debian again and then eventually i386 and amd64 for Ubuntu. This already offers well over two-thousand binary packages but not yet for all the flavours we would like to support eventually.
If and when that goal will be accomplished is hard to say; this is a volunteer effort and the main developer (Charles) recently lost his laptop.