Problems installing R packages in RHEL on Azure

Posit products can be installed and supported on all Red Hat-supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We frequently get questions about some R packages not installing in RHEL when hosted on the Azure cloud platform.

Some R packages require extra developer libraries or compilers when they are installed, which are regularly supplied by the Red Hat repository codeready-builder-for-rhel-*-x86_64-rpms. This repository isn't enabled by default.

If you are experiencing these issues, we will ask you to check which version of RHEL you have installed.

By default, RHEL instances started on Azure will often use the Extended Update Support (EUS) version of RHEL. The easiest way to check is to run yum repolist and see if the result includes any repos that have EUS in their name.

If you are using an EUS-based RHEL system, which is the default pay-as-you-go instance on Azure(1), you do not get access to codeready-builder(2):

1. As of April 2019, Azure offers RHEL images that are connected to Extended Update Support (EUS) repositories by default and RHEL images that come connected to the regular (non-EUS) repositories by default. More details on RHEL EUS are available in Red Hat's version lifecycle documentation and EUS documentation. The default behavior of sudo yum update will vary depending which RHEL image you provisioned from, as different images are connected to different repositories.
   
   https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/redhat/redhat-rhui#image-update-behavior

2. 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Extended Update Support repositories

 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86_64 - AppStream - Extended Update Support from RHUI (RPMs)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86_64 - BaseOS - Extended Update Support from RHUI (RPMs)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86_64 - High Availability - Extended Update Support from RHUI (RPMs)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86_64 - SAP NetWeaver - Extended Update Support from RHUI (RPMs)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86_64 - SAP Solutions - Extended Update Support from RHUI (RPMs)

https://access.redhat.com/articles/2130671

It looks like it is possible to remove the EUS, but this is outside of Posit's SLA and something that your team will need to make a decision on:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/redhat/redhat-rhui#switch-a-rhel-8x-vm-back-to-non-eus-remove-a-version-lock