title: Installing packages onto R
body: <p>For some reason I am suddenly not able to install packages in R (I have subsequently updated to the latest version of R and am running Windows 7). For example, if I type:</p>
  
  <pre><code>install.packages('beeswarm')
  </code></pre>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Installing package into ‘D:/Rlibs’ (as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
    --- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session --- trying URL '<a href="http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/bin/windows/contrib/3.0/beeswarm_0.1.5.zip" rel="noreferrer">http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/bin/windows/contrib/3.0/beeswarm_0.1.5.zip</a>'
    Content type 'text/html' length unknown opened URL downloaded 1859
    bytes</p>
    
    <p>Error in read.dcf(file.path(pkgname, "DESCRIPTION"), c("Package",
    "Type")) :    cannot open the connection In addition: Warning
    messages: 1: In unzip(zipname, exdir = dest) : error 1 in extracting
    from zip file 2: In read.dcf(file.path(pkgname, "DESCRIPTION"),
    c("Package", "Type")) :   cannot open compressed file
    'beeswarm/DESCRIPTION', probable reason 'No such file or directory'</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I have read that in Windows 7 there can be important restrictions on rights to writing to certain folders etc. so I've gone to some lengths to install R and library folders in non-default areas of my computer, and to allow myself rights to certain folders, but to no avail. Possibly also of importance is when I type:</p>
  
  <pre><code>.libPaths()
  
  # [1] "D:/Rlibs"                                             
  # [2] "C:/Users/L.Halsey/Documents/R/win-library/3.0"        
  # [3] "C:/Users/L.Halsey/Documents/Documents/R-3.0.1/library"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I have created several folders in an attempt to create one that I could successfully install libraries into and set them up to be recognised by R using 'environment variables' from the start button. I don't know how to delete any of them though - not sure if this is relevant to my overall problem of not now being able to install/update packages for some reason.</p>