link2gi provides functions that make it a bit easier to connect most of the common open source GI software packages to the R-biotop in a straightforward way. It supports both the use of wrapper packages and the direct use via system calls. It focuses on Linux and WindowsX operating systems but nevertheless it should also work with OSX.
To utilize the power of the open source GI tools from within R you need to install them first. As a first promising opportunity to do fullfil most of the requirements you may install QGIS, GRASS- and SAGA-GIS following the excellent installation instructions of the RQGIS package will have a good first try to ensure a smooth working environment. Note: for most of the cases you may use just RQGIS as wrapper for the QGIS related functionality.
If you have several versions installed or if you want to use the full power of the GI software it will be a nice and helpful tool to deal with some strange behaviours and requirements. Especially helpful is the support of OTB, the GDAL-Python functions and a simple support to use any SAGA version straightforward via the CLI. Hopefully RSAGA and Rsagacmd will join forces in one package in the future. Anyway the brand new release 1.0.0 of RSAGA as well as the current Rsagacmd will work with the environment settings as provided by linkSAGA.
Next major release will focus on adding CLI interfaces to the GI tools that will not anymore be hosted under the QGIS processing hood and hence will also loose the interface via RQGIS.
link2GIis up to CRAN. For the installation of the stable version please use install.packages("link2GI"). To install the cutting edge version use devtools::install_github("gisma/link2GI", ref = "master").