ubuntu 16.04 - R 3.4.1 "Single Candle" Personal Library Path Error: unable to create ‘NA’

Question

I just updated to R (3.4.1 "Single Candle") on my Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon machine and I attempted to install a package. R returned the following:

> install.packages('ggplot2')
Installing package into ‘/usr/local/lib/R/site-library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Warning in install.packages("ggplot2") :
  'lib = "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library"' is not writable
Would you like to use a personal library instead?  (y/n) y
Would you like to create a personal library
NA
to install packages into?  (y/n) y
Error in install.packages("ggplot2") : unable to create ‘NA’

I have encountered the 'lib not writable' output before but typically it offers a solution like this one:

Would you like to create a personal library
~/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.4
to install packages into?  (y/n) y 

Any ideas why the personal library is suggesting NA? Is there a way to manually override this?

Answer 1

I don't know what's causing this problem (i'm also experiencing it on Ubuntu 16.04), but here's a quick workaround:

.libPaths(c("/home/your_username/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.4/", .libPaths()))

Of course, you can replace "/home/your_username/..." for any another directory (that will store your personal library).

This solution makes install.packages() and library() work. Waiting for a full fix!

EDIT: I should note that this solution is not persistent. That is, it won't last after restarting R. You can fix this by adding the same line of code described above to the /home/your_username/.Rprofile file.