Installing Tidyverse in WSL without Timedatectl Status 1 Issue

wsl

Published

June 12, 2021

When I tried to install tidyverse in WSL2 I ran into issues with timedatectl and xml2. The simple solution is:

# Assuming Debian derivatives
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev
# Modify TZ to whatever your timeozne is
TZ="Australia/Sydney" R -e 'install.packages("tidyverse")'

Note

Systemd is now available in WSL and enabling it may be an alternative way to solve this issue.

What happens

When I try to install tidyverse I get this error:

> install.packages('tidyverse')

ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘xml2’
System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate.
Failed to create bus connection: Host is down
Warning in system("timedatectl", intern = TRUE) :
  running command 'timedatectl' had status 1
Error in loadNamespace(j <- i[[1L]], c(lib.loc, .libPaths()), versionCheck = vI[[j]]) :
  namespace ‘xml2’ 1.3.1 is already loaded, but >= 1.3.2 is required
Calls: <Anonymous> ... namespaceImportFrom -> asNamespace -> loadNamespace
Execution halted
ERROR: lazy loading failed for package ‘tidyverse’

Indeed timedatectl fails on WSL2 and there’s an open issue about it.

~ $ timedatectl
System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate.
Failed to create bus connection: Host is down

So it seems that timedatectl is being called in xml2 to get the timezone. While I find this a bit offputing, you can specify the timezone with the TZ environment variable, and then it doesn’t call timedatectl.

So putting this together gets to our original answer:

TZ="Australia/Sydney" R -e 'install.packages("tidyverse")'