completely uninstall r linux

Question

I am trying to update my version of R on linux mint, however broken dependencies are stopping me doing this. after trying everything such as adding repos from Cran, sudo apt-get update, I still cannot install the latest version of R.

MY question is how to i completely remove R from my machine, so that I can restart. I have tried :

sudo apt-get remove r-base

however when I run R it still works:

laptop$ R

R version 2.13.1 (2011-07-08)
Copyright (C) 2011 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

and doesn;t seem to be removed at all.

I want a clean, fresh install, but I don't think I am removing R properly

Answer 1

The R binary (well, front-end script) is part of the r-base-core package which contains the core R system.

The package r-base is a so-called virtual package which exists to just pulls other packages in. Removing it does not remove any parts of the R system --- for which you need to remove r-base-core.