A brief note on using development versions:
There are development versions of R and Bioconductor available for public use. These are nightly builds and as such are not fully stable (read: likely to contain bugs!). However they contain the most up-to-date version of the software and may have specific functions and features that aren’t present in the current stable release.fn6
For example the most recent stable R build is 2.15.1, while the development version is currently at 2.16.0 (the Developer’s aim to release an updated stable version of R yearly). Bioconductor releases follow a 6 monthly release cycle; at the moment Bioconductor stable is 2.10, development is at 2.11 and is expected for stable release in October 2012. If you are interested in using R and Bioconductor to analyse microarray data that was generated on newer technology, you’ll more than likely require development versions of the software to access all the analytical functionality as it is updated frequently by package developers.
To install the developer’s version of R visit the development section of the official site and follow the links to the required build (i.e. Windows, Linux, Mac). Follow the instructions detailed above to install.
Once you have the development version of R installed you’ll be able to install the latest Bioconductor development release using the same code as detailed above (see section “Installing Bioconductor”).
Windows 32/64bit: http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rdevel.html Note: Windows versions can be compiled via source, though you’ll need a gcc compatible compiler – if this is all jargon to you just stick with the binary installers.
Linux 32/64bit: http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ (you’ll have to choose flavour, download via sudo, or compile from source)
Mac 32/64bit: http://r.research.att.com/
fn6. It’s highly likely that you’ll have to download ‘nightly’ builds of R quite regularly as many Bioconductor developers use these when writing their packages. Fear not, this isn’t as gruelling as it may sound. ↩