sve.md

Using R/RStudio on the SVE service

What is the SVE?

A windows virtual desktop

The SVE offers two services:

• Win 10 Student service - this one has research & academic software suites such as RStudio etc. But it does not have persistence. This means that any packages you install or any repos you clone into your local space will vanish when you log out. The only expection is if you:
  • clone the repos to your MyDocuments/OneDrive account
  • work out how to use your Windows profile to 'host' the packages
• Win 10 Staff service - this is a generic staff service intended for admin & professional staff use (for now). While it does have persistence, it does not have RStudio installed...

Why would I use the SVE?

1. The 'Student' service hosts most of the applications you'll need including RStudio etc
2. It offers easy access to data folders such as J:// as you are effectively working 'on campus'. This makes data loading fast. Well... faster than doing it over your home broadband.
3. You can easily access your oneDrive folders.
4. The virtual PC instance you log in to has reasonable memory allocation so unless you have huuuge datasets you should be OK.

But:

1. No R package or repo persistence (see above)
2. It does not seem to be able to 'mount' Sharepoint/Teams folders - so you cannot easily load data held in them

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 now be persistent (it didn't used to be before the SVE upgrade).

RStudio in SVE

Packages

See note above re persistence.

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 loadPackages() function developed at SERG :-)