[R] Questions about R

Thu Sep 22 08:25:10 CEST 2005

                                                                Sep, 22nd,2005
Dear Authors,
Thanks for reading this email. I'm a graduate student from China  (PRC) and learning the R at present. Now I have some questions to ask you as I have met some strange problems during installing and running the R environment, which can not be found in the "R FAQ" document (or just I can not find them). 

It might be useful that I gived you the information of my operation system and hardwares. I am using R on a Mandrake Linux 10.1 operation system on a PC platform parchased from IBM company. The mainboard of my computer is Intel 915PG, that means it has an integrated graphic accelerator.

The first question is about the error occurs during my installation. Following the "R Installation and Administration" manual, I successully downloaded the latest version of R, unziped the file, and also completed the progress "./configure" and "make" successully. By the way, I managed to install a developmental package of Linux named "r77", which may be a FORTRAN developmental package, before installing the R environment into my computer. However, an error occured when I type the commond "make check" or "make check FORCE=FORCE" or "make check-devel", and the warnings displayed are written below:( Somewords are translated from Chinese into English by myself)

"running code in 'graphics-Ex.R' ...make[4]: *** [graphics-Ex.Rout] error 1
make[4]: Leaving directory `/home/zhengqi/R_HOME/R-2.1.1/tests/Examples'
make[3]: *** [test-Examples-Base] error 2
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/zhengqi/R_HOME/R-2.1.1/tests/Examples'
make[2]: *** [test-Examples] error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/zhengqi/R_HOME/R-2.1.1/tests'
make[1]: *** [test-all-basics] error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/zhengqi/R_HOME/R-2.1.1/tests'
make: *** [check] error 2"

What's the mean of the error messeage listed up? Why it happens in my computer? Which kind of problems is it, software's or hardware's? I just  ignored the mistakes, as it says in your installation manual that this kind of failures "is not  necessarilly problems as they might be caused by missing functionality", until I met with the following problem.

The second bug occured when I was doing some ordinary statistical work. Suppose v1 is a numerical vector of length(v1)==20; further suppose 
> v1 <- c(1:20).
When I type the command
> lines(density(v1))    
or
> rug(v1)
simillar errors take place, and it prompts the following messages below: ( some key words of the promption are translated into English by myself)
For the first command, it warns:
"error occurs at: plot.xy(xy.coords(x, y), type = type, col = col, lty = lty, ...) :
        'plot.new' hasn't been called yet"

and for the second command, it warns:
"error occurs at: axis(side, at = x, lab = FALSE, lwd = lwd, ...) :
        'plot.new' hasn't been called yet"
Besides: warnings:
some values will be clipped in: rug(v1)"

These are some description of the problems I met during the installing and running the R environment. And if you need more detail description of those problems, please let me know and I will gather any information about them as much as possible. 

Waiting for your reply!

Best wishes to everyone!

                                                            Sincerely yours,

                                          Anonymous user from Beijing, China