What if installation fails

If the suggested steps fail, or you have insufficient rights on your machine, you can use the following web-based solutions.

  1. Open a free account on posit.cloud. You can run your own cloud-based RStudio environment there.

  2. As a student from Utrecht University, you can use Utrecht University’s MyWorkPlace. You will have access to R and RStudio there. When you start a new MyWorkPlace session, you may need to (re)install packages.

Naturally, you will need internet access to use these services.

Decide the Right Fallback

Two students run into trouble installing R and RStudio:

  • Student A is on a personal laptop with a stable internet connection, but the installer keeps failing because they don’t have administrator rights on the machine.
  • Student B is at a remote field station with no internet access at all, and the local installation also isn’t working.

For each student, which fallback option from this page (if any) will actually solve their problem?

  • Student A: Either fallback works, posit.cloud or (if eligible) Utrecht University’s MyWorkPlace. Both run R and RStudio in the cloud, so no local admin rights are needed at all.
  • Student B: Neither fallback works. Both posit.cloud and MyWorkPlace are web-based solutions, so they still require internet access to reach.

Missing admin rights and missing internet access are different problems, only one of them has a workaround here.

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