Data Carpentry Workshop Setup Instructions

Requirements: Data Carpentry's teaching is hands-on, so participants are encouraged to bring in and use their own laptops to insure the proper setup of tools for an efficient workflow once you leave the workshop. (We will provide instructions on setting up the required software several days in advance.) There are no pre-requisites, and we will assume no prior knowledge about the tools.

Contact: Please email dtwrub@caltech.edu for questions and information not covered here.

Setup

To participate in this workshop, you will need working copies of the software described below. Please make sure to install everything and try opening it to make sure it works before the start of your workshop. If you run into any problems, please feel free to email the instructor or arrive early to your workshop on the first day. Participants should bring and use their own laptops to insure the proper setup of tools for an efficient workflow once you leave the workshop. Setup assistance will be available on Wednesday, March 28, from 12pm to 3pm at the Sherman Fairchild Reference Desk (1st floor of SFL), and Thursday, March 29, from 7am to 9am in the SFL Multimedia Conference room (MCR), 3rd floor of Sherman Fairchild, room 328.

We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.

R and RStudio

In the workshop, we will use RStudio. RStudio is a nice interface to the programming language R. To use RStudio, you need to install both R and RStudio.

The preferred version of R for this workshop is 3.4.3. Please note that a new version of R will be released on 3/15/18, this will be version 3.4.4. For stability's sake, please install version 3.4.3 if you have not installed R before, or please update to version 3.4.3 if you are using an older version.

The preferred version of RStudio for this workshop is 1.1.4xx. Please try to download the latest version of RStudio (1.1.423 as of this writing).

Windows

  1. Download R version 3.4.3 from here.
  2. Run the .exe file that was just downloaded.
  3. Go to the RStudio Download page
  4. Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzzz - Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10
  5. Double click the file to install it
  6. Once it's installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don't get any error messages.

Mac OS X

  1. Go to CRAN and click on Download R for (Mac) OS X.
  2. Select the .pkg file for the version of OS X that you have and the file will download.
  3. Double click on the file that was downloaded and R will install.
  4. Go to the RStudio Download page.
  5. Under Installers select RStudio 1.1.4xx - Mac OS X 10.6+ (64-bit) to download it.
  6. Once it's downloaded, double click the file to install it.
  7. Once it's installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don't get any error messages.

Linux

  1. Follow the instructions for your distribution from CRAN. For most distributions, you can use your package manager (e.g. for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base, and for Fedora run sudo yum install R) but make sure that you have at least R 3.2.2 (as pre-packaged versions might be out of date).
  2. To install RStudio, go to the RStudio Download page
  3. Under Installers select the version for your distribution.
  4. Once it's downloaded, double click the file to install it (or sudo dpkg -i rstudio-x.yy.zzz-amd64.deb at the terminal).
  5. Once it's installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don't get any error messages.
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