R-Tcl/Tk support on RedHat 9 (was Re: [BioC] Re: Bioconductor Digest, Vol 18, Issue 10)

[James Wettenhall]

Hi Mayte,

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004, Mayte Suarez-Farinas wrote:
> I had to upgrade to R 2.0.0 to be able to run GO. I made
> a fresh install from subversion. I am running Redhat 9.0.
> The tcltk built thus aborts:
>
> stop("Tcl/Tk support is not available on this system")

In previous versions of RedHat Linux, all you needed to get
R-Tcl/Tk support was the tcl and tk RPMs (RedHat packages),
whereas from RedHat 9.0 onwards (including Fedora), the tcl and
tk RPMs no longer include the header files tcl.h and tk.h so
you need to install the tcl-devel and tk-devel RPMs as well.

I don't know much about RPMs, but maybe it would be nice if the
recent RPMs for R (for RedHat Linux) could test whether
tcl-devel and tk-devel are missing and give a warning
if appropriate.

One other change to be aware of is that the Tcl/Tk files (from
RPM) on RedHat 9 and later are now in /usr/share/ instead of
/usr/lib/

Too see exactly where they are, just type:
rpm -ql tcl
rpm -ql tk

And I suspect that:
rpm -q tcl-devel
rpm -q tk-devel

will reveal that you have not yet installed these packages from
your RedHat 9 CDs.

Hope this helps,
James