[R] R GUI in Ubuntu?

[Andy Weller]

Dear all,

I am very new to R and find the terminal-based UI a little daunting. 
(That's probably the wrong thing to say!) Having searched the Packages 
it seems that I can have either a Gnome-based or Java-based GUI for my 
Ubuntu machine. However, I can get neither to work.

Having run R as root, I then run the following command:
install.packages("gnomeGUI", dependencies=TRUE)

The output of which is:
checking for gnomeConf.sh file in /usr/local/lib... not found
configure: error: conditional "HAVE_ORBIT" was never defined.
Usually this means the macro was only invoked conditionally.
ERROR: configuration failed for package 'gnomeGUI'
* Removing '/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/gnomeGUI'

I have checked to see if I have all dependencies installed - it seems as 
though I have. No luck! So I try the Java-based GUI with:
install.packages("JGR",dep=TRUE)
library(JGR)
JGR()

No luck. So, out of R I try:
sudo R CMD javareconf

Then in R, if I check the library with:
library(JGR)

I get:
Error: .onLoad failed in 'loadNamespace' for 'rJava'
Error: package 'rJava' could not be loaded

HMMmmm - still no joy! I guess I am missing something very basic here?!

Thanks in advance, Andy