[R] problem with RCurl install on Unix

[Prof Brian Ripley]

What is 'Unix' here?  It seems you mean ppc64 Linux (which is not Unix).

On Wed, 21 Mar 2007, Mark W Kimpel wrote:

> I am having trouble getting an install of RCurl to work properly on a
> Unix server. The steps I have taken are:
>
> 1. installed cUrl from source without difficulty
> 2. installed RCurl from source using the command
> 	~/R_HOME/R-devel/bin/R CMD INSTALL -l ~/R_HOME/R-devel/library
> ~/RCurl_0.8-0.tar.gz     I received no errors during this install
> 3. when I go back to R and require(RCurl), I get
>
> > require(RCurl)
> Loading required package: RCurl
> Error in dyn.load(x, as.logical(local), as.logical(now)) :
>         unable to load shared library
> '/N/u/mkimpel/BigRed/R_HOME/R-devel/library/RCurl/libs/RCurl.so':
>   libcurl.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
> °1§ FALSE
>
> Outside of R I get
>
> mkimpelàBigRed:¨/R_HOME/R-devel/library/RCurl/libs> ls
> RCurl.so
>
> I can cat into RCurl and I have even done chmod a+x RCurl.so in case
> there was a problem with permission for R to open the file.

Please do read the message it gave, which is not about opening RCurl.so. 
It is saying that libcurl.so.4 is not found by the run-time linker. 
Probably you installed it into a directory that is not cached by ldconfig, 
so where did you install it?  (One possible issue is lib64 vs lib.)


> Below is my sessionInfo. Thanks, Mark
>
> > sessionInfo()
> R version 2.5.0 Under development (unstable) (2007-03-11 r40824)
> powerpc64-unknown-linux-gnu
>
> locale:
> LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8;LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8;LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
>
> attached base packages:
> °1§ "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices" "datasets"  "utils"     "tools"
> °7§ "methods"   "base"
>
> other attached packages:
>     limma      affy    affyio   Biobase
>  "2.9.13" "1.13.14"   "1.3.3" "1.13.39"
> >
>
>
>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595