Hi everyone

I am new to using MacOS for R packages. I have recently purchased a MacBook Pro M1 with BigSur OS. My initial attempts to just use R were met with frustration and so I have done some reading in forums and taken advice. To date I have:

1. Downloaded and installed Xcode
2. Downloaded and install Xquartz
3. Downloaded gcc via home-brew

When I try and load R packages e.g. ChAMP, RnBeads I get the following error message:

Warning: unable to access index for repository https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/books/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1: cannot open URL 'https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/books/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1/PACKAGES'

Additionally when I enter warnings(), I get:

1: package(s) not installed when version(s) same as current; use force = TRUE to re-install: 'ChAMPdata' 'Illumina450ProbeVariants.db' 'limma' 'RPMM' 'marray' 'plyr' 'GenomicRanges' 'qvalue' 'isva' 'doParallel' 'quadprog' 'shiny' 'shinythemes' 'plotly' 'RColorBrewer' 'dendextend' 'matrixStats' 'combinat' 2: In .inet_warning(msg) : packages ‘RefFreeEWAS’, ‘FEM’ are not available for Bioconductor version '3.14'

Versions of these packages for your version of R might be available elsewhere, see the ideas at https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-patched/R-admin.html#Installing-packages 3: In .inet_warning(msg) : unable to access index for repository https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/bioc/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1: cannot open URL 'https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/bioc/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1/PACKAGES' 4: In .inet_warning(msg) : unable to access index for repository https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/data/annotation/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1: cannot open URL 'https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/data/annotation/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1/PACKAGES' 5: In .inet_warning(msg) : unable to access index for repository https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/data/experiment/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1: cannot open URL 'https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/data/experiment/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1/PACKAGES' 6: In .inet_warning(msg) : unable to access index for repository https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/workflows/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1: cannot open URL 'https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/workflows/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1/PACKAGES' 7: In .inet_warning(msg) : unable to access index for repository https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/books/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1: cannot open URL 'https://bioconductor.org/packages/3.14/books/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.1/PACKAGES' 8: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘Rhtslib’ had non-zero exit status 9: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘genefilter’ had non-zero exit status 10: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘edgeR’ had non-zero exit status 11: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘DNAcopy’ had non-zero exit status 12: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘preprocessCore’ had non-zero exit status 13: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘impute’ had non-zero exit status 14: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘affy’ had non-zero exit status 15: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘Rsamtools’ had non-zero exit status 16: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘sva’ had non-zero exit status 17: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘GenomicAlignments’ had non-zero exit status 18: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘rtracklayer’ had non-zero exit status 19: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘BSgenome’ had non-zero exit status 20: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘GenomicFeatures’ had non-zero exit status 21: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘TxDb.Hsapiens.UCSC.hg19.knownGene’ had non-zero exit status 22: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘VariantAnnotation’ had non-zero exit status 23: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘ensembldb’ had non-zero exit status 24: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘geneLenDataBase’ had non-zero exit status 25: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘bsseq’ had non-zero exit status 26: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘bumphunter’ had non-zero exit status 27: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘FDb.InfiniumMethylation.hg19’ had non-zero exit status 28: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘biovizBase’ had non-zero exit status 29: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘DSS’ had non-zero exit status 30: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘minfi’ had non-zero exit status 31: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘goseq’ had non-zero exit status 32: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘methylumi’ had non-zero exit status 33: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘IlluminaHumanMethylation450kanno.ilmn12.hg19’ had non-zero exit status 34: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘Gviz’ had non-zero exit status 35: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘IlluminaHumanMethylationEPICanno.ilm10b4.hg19’ had non-zero exit status 36: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘IlluminaHumanMethylation450kmanifest’ had non-zero exit status 37: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘IlluminaHumanMethylationEPICmanifest’ had non-zero exit status 38: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘lumi’ had non-zero exit status 39: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘missMethyl’ had non-zero exit status 40: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘wateRmelon’ had non-zero exit status 41: In .inet_warning(msg) : installation of package ‘DMRcate’ had non-zero exit status

Is the problem here due to differences in versions of R or do I still need to download/install some fundamental program? I am a medical specialist (pathologist) with rudimentary coding experience.

Thanks very much in advance!

Brendon ```

Hi,

It looks like you've installed the R binary for Apple silicon arm64 (R-4.1.2-arm64.pkg). This makes everything complicated because Bioconductor does not provide binary packages for this architecture. You should install the R binary for Intel 64-bit instead (R-4.1.2.pkg) and everything will work out-of-the-box. You won't even need Xcode or to install gcc via brew if you do that.

Hope this helps,

H.