(almost) Painlessly updating R from 3.0 to 3.1 in Ubuntu LTS 14.04 Trusty Tahr

If like me you decided to stick to Long Term Support versions of Ubuntu, and miss some of the new stuff in R 3.1+ such as XGBoost, you probably found out that you can’t install them due to some missing packages (namely plyr) for R 3.0.

One option is to add R’s repositories and install from cran mirror.

Another option is to grab the DEB files for Utopic Unicorn (14.10) already at 3.1, which happens to have no upgraded dependencies.

Good luck!