Dear R community,
I'm not sure this is the right place to put this in, but here we go:
Since a few weeks I'm having trouble using R Studio, which is related to the network and computer settings of my university, but I'm a bit disappointed I can't overrule this in R Studio. At my university everything is saved to a synchronisation drive called U:, and since three weeks the synchronisation with my computer is not working properly, therefore I can't open or save scripts or plots and so on. But this is not the main problem, as I can save those things somewhere else, the main problem is the R library. When installing R and R Studio, I can't choose where the libraries are installed, and even later I can't change this anywhere in R Studio. The basic R library is saved locally on C:, but everything I'm downloading myself goes to another library, which is in my case automatically set to some space that is synchronised on the U-drive. Apparently it depends on the Windows homepath settings on the computer. And although a colleague of mine was able to set up a new library directory to the local C:-drive, it was not possible to delete or overrule the old one (U:) without administrator rights, and when I try to install a package, although I can select it to go to the new C:-library, it doesn't really work, it still tries to install it to the old one. I totally blame the university IT for this problem, while the university IT blames the R software for not being capable of dealing with big university systems (they have no clue about R at all), and so I'm in some kind of unproductive stand-off since three weeks, and now the IT will finally re-install the entire system on the computer and hopefully this will solve the problems.
However, I'm not writing here to get a solution proposed for my specific problem, I just wish to suggest to the R Studio developers to adapt R Studio in a way that the user can change where the library is set. I'm really frustrated by now about the discussions with the university IT, and as I said, I'm a bit disappointed that I can't overrule the University settings with the power of R Studio on my own. And the way of checking and understanding and changing the library settings is rather user-unfriendly for non-R-users like the university IT, and they're not willing to spend a lot of time with this. Although I would not rule out that my university might be the only one not capable of dealing with R, maybe this issue could be addressed in a future release version? I really really appreciate using R Studio and wished more people would understand its benefits, thus I think it's important that also non-R-experienced IT people can easily deal with it.
Thanks for reading this.
Kind regards
I probably didn't follow your issue properly, but you can specify the directory where to install packages.
Check ?install.packages and the lib argument.
Tried, didn't work. Everything suggested here: https://www.accelebrate.com/library/how-to-articles/r-rstudio-library was tried, too, but as I could not access the synchronisation U-drive, I could not switch the default to another one (always got an error that the old directory is not recognized). I know, it sounds weird and unlikely. Maybe it's a once-in-a-million issue and only related to my computer, my only point is that it would be nice to not have the library set by default to a specific place I can't choose during the installation, I would like to be able to choose that before it is installed.
You can change your libPaths() from your Rprofile.site file and set the default installation path to the one you like the most.
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