How Posit’s Public Package Manager Manylinux_2_28 repository can help you if your R project is stuck on Ubuntu Focal Fossa | R bloggers

Introduction

I’m a big fan of repositories that make binary R packages available. This includes the canonical CRAN repositories,
r universe,
r2hand the
Posit (public) package managerand there are more. R-universe is excellent because it builds binaries from only GitHub packages. The Posit Public Package Manager is excellent for its incredible breadth (it creates binaries for 14 Linux distributions) and also for its depth (its almost daily snapshot service is remarkably useful for quickly creating reproducible R environments).

Today I wanted to highlight how the velelinux_2_28 packages in the Posit Public Package Manager helped me. Posit released this
June 2025. Ironically, I was using another Posit service, Posit Cloud (formerly RStudio Cloud). Within this I have quite a number of projects in workspaces that are more than 3 years old. Behind the scenes these run on Ubuntu Focal Fossa Linux. I believe that if I create a new Posit Cloud RStudio project that will run on Ubuntu Noble Numbat, users of new projects will not need this tip.

Unfortunately, Focal Fossa is no longer supported (unless you have Ubuntu Pro) and so Posit has removed their Focal repository packages from the Posit Public Package Manager, which is fair enough. Within the Posit Cloud project workspace, Posit has kindly made available a private version of what I believe was that Focal repository. However, for reasons I don’t fully understand, a lot of the packages I needed weren’t built as binaries.

That got me thinking: could the Manylinux_2_28 packages help here? In the name, 2.28 refers to the minimum version of the glibc library that the Linux distro should ship with. I realized that I didn’t know which version of glibc Ubuntu Focal Fossa came with. A quick one

ldd --version

revealed

ldd (Ubuntu GLIBC 2.31-0ubuntu9.17) 2.31
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Written by Roland McGrath and Ulrich Drepper.

And that’s why I was lucky, because version 2.31 is after 2.28. So in my Posit Cloud workspace I simply changed my syntax to installing packages

install.packages(
  'tidyverse',
  repos="https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/__linux__/manylinux_2_28/latest"
)

and all the packages arrived as binaries. If you are not running this from RStudio, your syntax should look like this
the settings page

options(repos = 
  c(
    CRAN = sprintf("https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/latest/bin/linux/manylinux_2_28-%s/%s",
    R.version["arch"], 
    substr(getRversion(), 1, 3))
  )
)
install.packages('tidyverse')

My other solution could have been to create a new RStudio project, which, as I said, would run on Noble Numbat.

Summary

In summary, many Linux_2_28 binary packages in Posit Public Package Manager can be used in Ubuntu Focal Fossa. Thanks again to Posit for this great resource.

Related