Tutorial: Installing R on an offline Ubuntu computer

The following steps show you how to install R (the statistical software) on your offline Ubuntu machine. This will be useful for people who not only want to generate bitcoin addresses on their offline computers using dice, but also want to statistically test their dice for bias.

There is a benefit to throwing a die a 100 times, test the sequence, and if no evidence of bias is found, use that same sequence for the bitcoin address generation. What benefit? Well, I have personally had a situation where I found out on the first day that there was an evidence of bias. But on another day with the same die but a different surface, there was no evidence of bias. So it can be useful to just use the same sequence for both testing and, if the test is good, real-world use. Hence this tutorial.

I have tested these steps on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS only, but I suppose they will work on other Ubuntu/Linux systems as well.

Here are the steps:

On a virtual machine (or a real machine if you want) that is allowed to connect to the internet, do a clean install of the same system that is on your offline computer. In my case, that is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
On this fresh online system, download this Python script by Alan Reiner (the originator of Bitcoin Armory).
On the Terminal, run python apt-get-offline.py r-base.
Use a USB key to get the resulting download_r-base folder onto your offline computer.
On your offline computer, use sudo dpkg -i *.deb in that folder to install R on your offline computer.
You can now use R on your offline computer by simply running R on the Terminal.

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