A brief installation guide for ‘Luminescence’ on Ubuntu and Linux Mint

by Dirk Mittelstrass (January 2, 2022)

Luminescence >= 0.9.0

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I made my self familiar with the Linux distribution Ubuntu in the last weeks and found it quite challenging to get the 'Luminescence' package up and running, especially as I had been a complete Linux newbie. To save others a couple of hours of time in fiddling it out tedious details, here is my short tutorial for the 'Luminescence' package installation in Ubuntu 20.04. This guide should also work for Linux Mint because it is based on Ubuntu (Linux Mint is the user-friendly Windows-like version of Linux). Be aware, you will need the system console for the installation process, accessible by pressing Ctrl-Alt-T.

1 Step 1: Install R and RStudio

As for December 2021, the R version available in the Ubuntu Software Center is version 3.6. However, you will need version 4.0 or higher to get the 'Luminescence' package running. Follow the guide provided in this link to install the latest version of R: https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/

There exists an alternative way to install R: Download the latest tar.gz file from r-project.org, unpack it and open the file INSTALL to read the instructions therein.

Installing RStudio is easy. Download the version for Ubuntu 18 here: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/#download

Right-click at the installation file and execute it via Software Install.

2 Step 2: Install the ‘Luminescence’ package

You can install Luminescence with the RStudio installation manager. However, the installation will fail with a “non-zero exit status”. As it turns out, you have to install some additional Linux libraries to install all Luminescence package dependencies. At my system, I needed to install the following four. Execute the following commands in the system console one after another:

sudo apt install libgdal-dev
sudo apt install libssl-dev
sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev
sudo apt install libxml2-dev

Retry the Luminescence installation. With some luck, it works now. However, your system may need more libraries (I already installed some other stuff in advance). Search the Luminescence installation log for some missing library files. You can simply copy-paste that missing file name into a command line in three out of four cases as above. In the fourth case, Google will help. ;-)

Update 2022-06-03: 'Luminescence' dropped its dependency to ‘raster’ with version 0.9.18 and with it libgdal is no longer required!