Install RDQA in rStudio in Ubuntu

By: Thomas Hawkins     Published Date: 2019-08-29 08:10:00

r rdqa linux

Instructions

This tutorial will outline the steps I took to install RDQA for use with RStudio in xUbuntu 18.04.3 LTS.

• R: https://www.r-project.org/
  • An application that can be used for statistical analysis.  Similar to SPSS, Stata, etc...
• RStudio: https://www.rstudio.com/
  • An excellent integrated development environment (IDE) for R.  Makes it much simpler to get up and running with R.
• RDQA: http://rqda.r-forge.r-project.org/
  • GUI package for doing qualitative coding using some of R's native capabilities.

The installation instructions are available on the main RDQA homepage.  I'll modify them below for xUbuntu 18.04.3

1) Required if not already installed.  If you attempt to install and compile RDQA without it, it will partially complete but ultimately fail.

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev

2) I already had R installed, but you can install in as described, or through apt-get or synaptic.  

2a) Not listed, but obviously required if you are installing for use with RStudio.  Install RStudio.  You can find instructions on the RStudio website: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/#download

3 / 4) Open RStudio (or R) and type the following at the command line (console window):

install.packages("RQDA",dependencies=c("Depends", "Imports"))

It will go through a lot of steps of installing dependencies, and compiling the libraries.  Eventually, it should say * DONE (RQDA).  If you don't get that, I'd double check all of the libraries from step 1 installed correctly, or google the error.

5) Type library(RQDA) to launch RQDA.  It will open another window which will allow you to use RQDA.

Interesting things to note:

1) If you are attempting to create your project on a network mount, you may run into this error:

Warning: changing locked binding for ‘n’ in ‘gWidgets’ whilst loading ‘RQDA’
[1] "/home/username/networkmounts/a_network_mount/data-analysis/Survey 2019/text-analysis-improve-academic-experience"
Error: database is locked
[1] "/home/username/networkmounts/a_network_mount/data-analysis/Survey 2019/text-analysis-improve-academic-experience.rqda"
Error: no such table: project

It is possible it didn't like the spaces in the folder path too.  Loading should look more like this:

[1] "/home/username/code/rqda/Survey_2019/text-analysis-improve-academic-experience"