I’ve been tasked a few times recently to stand up AWS EC2 instances as shared data science/development platforms, including the R and RStudio Server stack. (I prefer RHEL 7 for familiarity.) R depends on EPEL for installation on top of RHEL, and adding EPEL to yum is pretty straightforward:
$ sudo yum install -y epel-release
$ sudo yum update -y
Trying to sudo yum install R, however, still fails having not found the dependency usetex-tex. It was surprisingly difficult to track down a clean solution, but a buried, not-accepted StackExchange answer has it right: usetex-tex is listed in a disabled-by-default set of packages. Enable rhel-server-optional and we’re in business:
$ sudo yum-config-manager --enable rhui-REGION-rhel-server-optional
$ sudo yum install -y texinfo-tex
$ sudo yum install -y R