It’s possible to keep your R version updated on Ubuntu 14.04 if you decide not to use the version provided by the package maintainer. In this small guide I explain how to do that especially if you are under a proxy server.

In this case I use the proxy of unitn on port 3128. Open a terminal and export the variables https_proxy, http_proxy, ftp_proxy and ftps_proxy to the same value http://proxy.unitn.it:3128.

Then add the string "deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu precise/" and "deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu trusty/" to your /etc/apt/sources.list file to enable trusty and precise repositories from the CRAN. We do this with the command:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu precise/" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu trusty/" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'

We then add to the keyserver the key from the CRAN repo:

sudo -E gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key E084DAB9

It’s important to do sudo -E so that the super-user environment variables are the same as the one set before (in particular the proxy variables).

How to install latest R on servers under proxy

This is the final list of commands to issue in a terminal.

export http_proxy=http://proxy.unitn.it:3128
export https_proxy=http://proxy.unitn.it:3128
export ftp_proxy=http://proxy.unitn.it:3128
export ftps_proxy=http://proxy.unitn.it:3128
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu precise/" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu trusty/" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
sudo -E gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key E084DAB9
sudo -E gpg -a --export E084DAB9 | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install r-base