[R] Can't resolve dependency problems with package "sem"

[C&A Säger]

Am 05.05.2016 um 01:41 schrieb Jeff Newmiller:
> Did you follow the instructions for setting up apt to pull recent
> versions of R, as described in CRAN? I suspect not, since your version
> is old.
> -- 

Hello Jeff,

Thank you very much for taking notice.

I was hoping that any old version which used to be the best of breed 3
years ago would be just fine for absolute beginners.
I did not even know that CRAN exists until I actually installed the
software. I use Ubuntu because compiling software is a major annoyance
to me. Since 2002 I use to compile something every now and then when it
is the only way to get something installed.

Right now I try to follow the R installation guide carefully but dumb
because I don't really understand what I'm doing. configure, make, make
check, everything runs OK so far but sudo make install fails anyway.
What a horrible waste of time and electricity!

Actually, I'm trying to help my daughter who needs to learn some R
basics. The installation on a Windows PC is a matter of minutes by
following a tiny instructional PDF from her tutor. But she does not have
the time nor knowledge to install R successfully on her Ubuntu PC which
is the same as mine. While she has some real work to do, I'm trying to
get this darn thing onto our computers. Even if I manage to compile a
working R program on my computer, this will not be of any help for my
daughter who does not have the compilers installed and I don't know
which packages make it happen on my PC. I'd have to build my first
Debian package which might take another day of reading and testing.

[...]

Meanwhile the installation of R out of debian packages from a CRAN
server did the job and I managed to ...

>  install.packages("Rcmdr",dependencies=TRUE)

... which finished with ...

> ** testing if installed package can be loaded
> * DONE (Rcmdr)

... but also with warnings ...

> 1: In install.packages("Rcmdr", dependencies = TRUE) :
>   Installation des Pakets ‘rgl’ hatte Exit-Status ungleich 0
> 2: In install.packages("Rcmdr", dependencies = TRUE) :
>   Installation des Pakets ‘rglwidget’ hatte Exit-Status ungleich 0

.. due to these errors:

> configure: error: missing required header GL/gl.h
> ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘rgl’

> ERROR: dependency ‘rgl’ is not available for package ‘rglwidget’


Thank you very much for the pointer to this instructive page:

> http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/misc/cran/

May be we can live without GL support for now.

Greetings,
Andreas