[R] Problem with R-2.1.0: install.packages() doesn't work

[Peter Dalgaard]

Manuel Morales <Manuel.A.Morales at williams.edu> writes:

> On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 17:48 +0200, Uwe Ligges wrote:
> > Waichler, Scott R wrote:
> > 
> > > I installed R-2.1.0 from source on a Linux box running Red Hat
> > > Enterprise Linux WS release 4 but install.packages() wouldn't work (see
> > > below).
> 
> > >>install.packages("rgenoud")
> > > 
> > > --- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session ---
> > > Error in inherits(x, "factor") : Object "res" not found
> > 
> > 
> > Quite probably you have no X11 connection to this machine.
> > R tries to ask you which CRAN mirror you are going to choose, and it 
> > fails to present the tcltk window.
> > You might want to call
> >    chooseCRANmirror(graphics=FALSE)
> > and
> >    setRepositories(graphics=FALSE)
> > prior to install.packages().
> > 
> > Uwe Ligges
> > 
> 
> I have the same problem after building R-2.1.0 from source on Fedora
> Core 3. The suggestion above fixes this, but what do you mean by "Quite
> probably you have no X11 connection on this machine"? I'm guessing you
> don't mean that X11 is not "running" (I use Gnome for my desktop).

Gnome runs on top of X11, so that's not possible. However, if you're
running remotely, or for some reason lost your DISPLAY setting, you
might not have a connection to X11.

There's a buglet somewhere. AFAICS, we end up calling
chooseCRANmirror() with the default graphics=TRUE, even when
capabilities("X11") is FALSE. Probably easiest to fix inside menu(),
so that it produces the text menu if asked for a graphics menu with
insufficient capabilities.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
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