[R] How to install FunNet from source (on Linux, sorry for Windows…)

FunNet was removed from CRAN to due import conflicts, but thankfully still is available from the archives. That makes it a bit harder to install it, yet still fairly easy on Linux.

First, install system dependencies. If you’ve already installed other R packages, you’ll have the usual development stuff which I don’t remember (gcc, g++, etc I assume). To this, you’ll have to add the dependencies of the Cairo R package, which are the Cairo software itself and some development library for the X server:
apt-get install libcairo2-dev libxt-dev
(NB: for the latter, it may be different depending on your distribution, see also this post on Stackoverflow)

With this done, you’re ready to head on to R. Just maybe first grab the latest FunNet source:
wget http://www.cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/FunNet/FunNet_1.00-12.tar.gz

Now in R, install dependencies:
install.packages('ade4')
install.packages('sna')
install.packages('Cairo')

And finally the installation of FunNet should work now:
install.packages('FunNet_1.00-12.tar.gz')
(to run this, make sure your R working directory is where you downloaded the file, otherwise adapt the path of course)

And voilà, congratulations, you now have FunNet, and it should work ^^

Last but not least though, the user manual. I haven’t managed to figure out how to build the help PDF so far, however something worked nice for me on Windows (yeah my setup is Windows on my workstation, Linux on my servers): you can just go to the folder where the package (aka “library”) got installed on Linux (if you don’t install it as root, it should tell you during the install and this should be under something like ~/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/[version]/FunNet), then download the whole FunNet folder and put this into your R library folder on Windows. That won’t make you able to run FunNet (probably not to load the package either), however if you use RStudio you’ll be able to browse the help files from there. You’re welcome 😉