[R-sig-Debian] GUI for R

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

[ resending with 8-bit clean mail header, and one fix below --edd ]

On 7 October 2006 at 15:44, Janno Tuulik wrote:
| Hei Cristiano,
| 
| Take a look at RKWard (http://rkward.sourceforge.net) 

I would not (yet ?) recommend RKWard as it is in very stages and has fairly
incomplete coverage of R.

| (http://rosuda.org/JGR/). Unfortunately, I have never tried to install those 
| on sarge. 

The excellent JGR is a very good choice.  As Janno said, it may be tricky on
stable.  It just became a lot easier to install on unstable (and I still have
to post a short writeup) using R 2.4.0 and its new 'R CMD javareconf' which
can update R's knowledge of where your Java installation is. 

Unfortunately, JGR is still somewhat outside Debian as it wants Sun's Java
JDK so I don't think I'll ever package it directly.  Now, if someone wanted
to outside of Debian ...  In fact, the CRAN maintainers mention that
idea. Maybe one day.

| On Saturday 07 October 2006 14:11, Cristiano Nattèro wrote:
| > Hello everybody,
| >
| >    I'm trying to use GNU R on a debian stable but I didn't manage to
| > make any GUI work. Then I saw that:
| >
| >
| > $ apt-cache show r-gnome
| > <snip>
| > As of R 2.1.0, this interface is no longer provided with the upstream
| > sources. As such, this package is now an empty stub that will be removed
| > in a subsequent revision of the Debian package.
| > ...
| >
| >
| >    Can you help me, please? I'm not keen on Gnome, any working GUI would
| > be fine.

As I tried to say here, the Gnome gui for R is no longer included upstream
and hence no longer packages for Debian.

The code does exist, though, on CRAN, so you could just fire up R and say

   > install.packages("gnomeGUI")

but note that you will have to take care of all the Build-Depends.
Alternatively, download the tarball yourself outside of R from
    
   http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/gnomeGUI_2.3.0-3.tar.gz

and say

   $ sudo R CMD INSTALL gnomeGUI_2.3.0-3.tar.gz

All that said, this (old) Gnome GUI is not all that powerful. JGR is current,
maintained, and offers a number of things standard R hasn't.

| > (BTW, is this the right place? If not where can I ask?)

It really isn't all that on-topic here.  We are running a small Debian
mailing list called r-sig-debian off the R mail server as well. That is
probably the most topical list and I'll CC it now.

Hope this helps,  Dirk (wearing his R maintainer hat)

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison