[R-gui] Re: [R] Feedback about SciViews?

[Luke Whitaker]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, A.J. Rossini wrote:

> "Liaw, Andy" <andy_liaw at merck.com> writes:
> 
> >> The GUI itself (i.e., how it operated, what menus were where, etc.) 
> >> was fine, but it was completely useless for anyone sitting at a 
> >> remote host, due to dreadful image quality and poor performance when 
> >> displaying anywhere other than on the console of the machine on which 
> >> SPlus was actually running.
> >
> > AFAIK the problem is the X server: it gives you a black window if the X
> > display is 16-bit.  If you can live with 8-bit display, the Java GUI will
> > work.  It's that way on all Unix (X?) platform.
> 
> I thought Java on Linux would do 8 and 24, but not 16?  (or something
> truly weird like that).
> 
> But that doesn't address performance issues, which still can be pretty
> bad.

It seems the problem here is limited to running R remotely. Given
the power of cheap consumer desktop machines these days, this seems
to me less of an issue than it used to be. Expensive commercial
software probably gets run remotely more than it needs to because
of licensing issues, which obviously don't apply to R.

If the GUI can be cleanly split from the compute engine of R, then
it should be quite easy to get the GUI running locally even if the
compute engine is remote - although I re-iterate my question for the
need to run free software remotely. My very modest desktop machine
is far more powerfull than the mainframe that I learnt to use SAS
on, and not so far short of the very expensive file server that I
use now.

Luke