So, I set up a brand new laptop from scratch. I took debian 9. In order to get R, I fetched the source code from CRAN.

I had to install the following dependencies upfront:

apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install fort77
apt-get install xorg-dev
apt-get install liblzma-dev  libblas-dev gfortran
apt-get install gcc-multilib
apt-get install gobjc++
apt-get install libreadline-dev
apt-get install libbz2-dev
apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev
apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

Then a simple ./configure, make and make install and there we are.

As daily workhorses, I also install several R packages:

install.packages("xts")

That’s it. R is ready for work.