Starting with RStudio at Macalester

Your RStudio Account

All registered Macalester students are set up, at the beginning of the year, with an RStudio account on [this server]. Students from other schools or PSEO students can get an account by writing to their instructor.

Logging in for the First Time

Go to and login.

• Your ID is the same as your Macalester email ID (e.g., “bsmith”).
• Initially, your password is the last four digits of your student ID. (If you are one of the few students to have to ask for an account from your instructor, you will be sent an initial password.)

Once you are logged in, your browser window will look like this:

It's OK that the URL has changed from www.macalester.edu/rstudio. The actual of the Macalester RStudio server is “in the cloud.” Funding for this service on the Amazon Web Services cloud is provided by the US National Science Foundation, Project MOSAIC, NSF DUE-0920350, as well as a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Things to do after you log in

1. You may want to change your password, although you are welcome to keep using your initial password. If you do change your password, make sure to keep track of it. Unfortunately, we do not yet have the password system set up to make it easy for us to reset your password as needed.

   • Select the Tools/Shell menu item on the menu next to the blue R ball. A dialog box will pop up.
   • At the prompt, type the command passwd and press return.
   • You will be asked for your initial password (the one you logged in with), and then prompted to enter your new password twice. Standard thing that you see elsewhere, but without the nice interface.
   • If your password was too simple, the system will reject it.
     
   • When you're done, close the dialog box by pressing the “close” button.

2. Bookmark the RStudio web page on your browser. Of course, the URL, www.macalester.edu/rstudio isn't too hard to remember, either.

3. Students in Math 135, 153, and 155 should go to the tab marked “Packages” in the bottom right part of the window. Scroll down to the mosaic package and check the box. This will load the mosaic package into R.

Once you've done this, chances are you will never have to do these things again.

Start to Play

For the most part, you will use R by typing commands into the “Console” window. Just to get started, try these commands:

3 + 2
8 * 8

You're good to go.

Resources

• Math 135 “Applied Calculus” students: The StartR in Calculus book is available online.
• Math 155 “Introduction to Statistical Modeling” students: Instructions on R are provided in the last section of each chapter of the Statistical Modeling book. The first chapter is available online.
• Help pages for the mosaic package functions, e.g., help(plotFun).