[BioC] Problem with getBM function in biomaRt package

[Luo Weijun]

Hello all, 
I am trying to get gene symbols and full gene names
(description) for a long list of (>=8000) genes. I use
getBM function in biomaRt package. And the code is
pretty much the same as Jim¡¯s ¡®HowTo: get pretty
HTML output for my gene list¡¯ vignette. Everything
works fine when I use a much shorter list (100 genes),
i.e. igenes= hs95av2Entrezg7[1:100] in the following
codes. But when igene= hs95av2Entrezg7 (full gene
list), getBM doesn¡¯t work, and returns an error
message. 

> library(biomaRt)
Loading required package: XML
Loading required package: RCurl
> mart <- useMart("ensembl", "hsapiens_gene_ensembl")
Checking attributes and filters ... ok
>
load('/Users/luow/project/microarraydata/annotation/hs95av2Entrezg7.Rdata')
> igenes=hs95av2Entrezg7
<escription"), filter = "entrezgene",values = igenes,
mart = mart, output = "list",na.value ='')            
                             
##(note here my orginal input is:
 genelist=getBM(attributes =
c("hgnc_symbol","description"), filter =
"entrezgene",values = igenes, mart = mart, output =
"list",na.value ='')
##and this long line is truncated in the terminal
screen somehow)
Error in postForm(paste(mart at host, "?", sep = ""),
query = xmlQuery) : 
        couldn't connect to host
>

Since Jim also suggests that RMySQL is much faster
than RCurl, I also tried to install RMySQL package,
but the error messages says there is no such package,
even though I did see RMySQL is there in the
contributed package list in all mirror sites of CRAN I
tried. Not sure what is the problem.

> install.packages('RMySQL', repos =
"http://www.biometrics.mtu.edu/CRAN/")      
Warning in download.packages(pkgs, destdir = tmpd,
available = available,  : 
         no package 'RMySQL' at the repositories
>

Here is my session info 
> sessionInfo()
Version 2.3.1 (2006-06-01) 
powerpc-apple-darwin8.6.0 

attached base packages:
[1] "methods"   "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices"
"utils"     "datasets" 
[7] "base"     

other attached packages:
 biomaRt    RCurl      XML 
 "1.6.0"  "0.6-2" "0.99-7" 
>

I actually can¡¯t even do sessionInfo after the getBM
line got broken.
> sessionInfo()
Error in gzfile(file, "rb") : unable to open
connection
In addition: Warning messages:
1: list.files:
'/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/library' is
not a readable directory 
2: cannot open compressed file
'/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/library/biomaRt/Meta/package.rds'

>

Thank you so much for your kind help!
Weijun