[BioC] Network install of packages

Anthony Mullen mullen1 at uiuc.edu
Thu Nov 6 19:11:27 CET 2008


Greetings -

I am a Linux system administrator for the Department of Mathematics and 
the University of Illinois.  I installed R, perl-bioperl and 
perl-bioperl-run for a couple researchers who are doing collaboration 
using these tools.

I was asked to install Bioconductor packages.  I took a quick look at 
the installation notes at the bioconductor.org page.  And I have a few 
questions.

Where can I find the sizes of these standard/additional packages?  If I 
install these packages as root will they be available to other users? 
Or will each person have to install Bioconductor packages themselves?

I think I see what I need to do if I were to install these packages. 
But if Bioconductor packages are installed only in a local user-space. 
Then it doesn't make any sense for me to install them as root.

It looks like the commands I may want to use are:

#invoke R
source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite()
biocLite(groupName="all")

But I see a note that states that selecting 'all' software packages will 
take up a lot of space.  But if the packages can be installed by root, 
such that other's can use the packages.  I can install all the 
Bioconductor packages on a local computer.  And the users network home 
directories won't have to support all the disk space.

I hope this all makes sense.  If you need any more clarification please 
don't hesitate in letting me know.

Tony -



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