[R] ess in Windows (newbie Q)

[Murray Eisenberg]

I'm a rank beginner with R, and I'm stumped at how to get it to work 
with Xemacs under Windows XP. I'm afraid there are some VERY basic 
questions I have here.  Yes, I did read 
http://ess.r-project.org/Manual/readme.html.

Both R and Xemacs are installed and working.  The current ess files are 
installed in a subdirectory of my Xemacs directory.  I added the R bin 
directory to my Windows PATH environment variable.

But when I start Xemacs and then give command

   M-x-R

what I see in the mini-buffer is

   M-x-Rd-

and it's waiting for more input.

So what could be wrong?  ....

1. Where might I find or should I put the requisite Xemacs init.el, in 
which I'm supposed to enter a line of the form

   (load "/PATH/ess-site")

to point to the ess location?  I found no such file anywhere on my 
system, so I created one in each of the _two_ HOME directories I have -- 
one pointed to by the enviroment system variable HOME and the other 
pointed to by the user environment variable HOME (which seem to be 
different -- I don't recall whether that happened automatically when I 
installed Singular or whether I did it manually).

2. And what should that file actually be called?  The ess docs say it 
should be %HOME%/.xemacs/init.el for Xemacs, but they also say to put it 
in the .emacs (or _emacs) file or default.el or site-init.el.

I'm using "init.el".

3. Did I get the form of that line correct for init.el (or whatever it 
should actually be named)?  My file ess-site.el is in

     D:\WP\XEmacs\ess-5.2.3\lisp

so the line I actually put into default.el is:

   (load "/D:/WP/XEmacs/ess-5.2.3/lisp/ess-site")

4.  Anything else I should check or do to proceed?


-- 
Murray Eisenberg                     murray at math.umass.edu
Mathematics & Statistics Dept.
Lederle Graduate Research Tower      phone 413 549-1020 (H)
University of Massachusetts                413 545-2859 (W)
710 North Pleasant Street            fax   413 545-1801
Amherst, MA 01003-9305