A windows [virtual desktop](https://sotonac.sharepoint.com/teams/IT/SitePages/Services/SouthamptonVirtualEnvironment.aspx/)
Use the Win 10 Student service as it has research & academic software suites such as RStudio etc. The Win 10 Staff service is a generic staff service intended for admin & professional staff use (for now).
## Why would I use it?
It hosts most of the applications you'll need including RStudio etc
It offers easy access to [data folders such as J://](keepingData.md) as you are effectively working 'on campus'. This makes data loading fast. Well... faster than doing it over your home broadband.
You can easily access your oneDrive folders.
The virtual PC instance you log in to has reasonable memory allocation so unless you have huuuge datasets you shodl be OK.
## Git
Git is installed - yay!
You will need to create your RSA key so that git (inside or outside RStudio) can talk to github/gitlab etc. This RSA key should no be persistent (it didn't used to be before the SVE upgrade).
## RStudio in SVE
### Packages
If you need to add new packages use the install.packages() function. This seems to be able to bypass a permissons issue in C:/Apps/RLibraries which causes the normal the RStudio GUI/tab method to fail.
Better yet use the new & improved loadPackages() function developed at SERG :-)
