[R] Installing from RPM on Red Hat 9

[James Wettenhall]

Ted,

If you are missing a shared library (libtk8.3.so) then you could 
just find the appropriate rpm on the RedHat9 CDs, perhaps 
tk-8.3.5-88.i386.rpm in /RedHat/RPMS on the second CD, and install 
it with sudo rpm -i.

BUT, there are some known bugs in the Tcl/Tk that comes with 
Redhat 9 (which don't exist in previous Redhat distributions) :

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=89098
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=101678
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=100793
http://www.interlink.com.au/anthony/tech/rh9-tcltk/

What I did recently on Redhat 9 is install Tcl/Tk 8.4 from 
source (configure;make;make install; for Tcl, then for Tk) and 
then install R from source (configure;make;make install).  You 
can get Tcl/Tk source from www.tcl.tk and to build them you need 
the X11 developer's kit which can be installed from rpm off the 
Redhat9 CDs : Install XFree86-devel-4.3.0-2.i386.rpm which requires 
fontconfig-devel-2.1-9.i386.rpm and freetype-2.1.3-6.i386.rpm.

Installing R from source will put it (by default) in 
/usr/local/bin/R rather than /usr/bin/R

HTH,
James