[R] installing R on Fedora Core 2 test 2

[Roger D. Peng]

For readline you are probably missing the development version of 
readline which usually contains the header files.  I think it's still 
called readline-devel but it's been a while for me.

-roger

Jonathan Baron wrote:
> 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