[R] installing R on Fedora Core 2 test 2

[Jonathan Baron]

Just a report for those who want to try this.  (Executive
summary: It eventually worked.)

The RPM for Fedora Core 1 did not work because it wanted
libtcl8.3.so and libtk8.3.so, while this distribution had 8.4
instead of 8.3.  I didn't try making soft links, thus pretending
that it had 8.3.  (I'm planning to install the final version of
Core 2 when it comes out soon.  This is a computer I set up
yesterday for grad students to learn about Linux and R.)

I installed from source and that went pretty smoothly, once I
realized my mistake in NOT doing what Martyn Plummer did with
Core 1, which was to install the "workstation" version of Fedora
rather than the "personal" version (or whatever it is called).
As a result, I had to install gcc and lots of other stuff.
Fortunately, Fedora comes with yum, which makes such
installations incredibly easy.  You just say, for example, 

yum install gcc

and its done pretty fast (assuming you have a fast connection).

The one thing I cannot figure out is that readline does not
work.  It was installed, but apparently not detected.  Grepping
config.site for readline gets stuff like this:

configure:21256: checking for rl_callback_read_char in -lreadline
configure:21286: gcc -o conftest -g -O2 -I/usr/local/include
-L/usr/local/lib conftest.c -lreadline  -ldl -lncurses -lm  >&5
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lreadline
configure:22002: checking readline/history.h usability
conftest.c:83:30: readline/history.h: No such file or directory
| #include <readline/history.h>
configure:22046: checking readline/history.h presence
conftest.c:49:30: readline/history.h: No such file or directory
[more stuff like this]
ac_cv_header_readline_history_h=no
ac_cv_header_readline_readline_h=no
ac_cv_lib_readline_rl_callback_read_char=no

This is not a huge problem in practice, since ESS under Xemacs
does work fine, and ESS has the main functions of readline.

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page:            http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
R page:               http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/