[R-sig-Debian] ubuntu configuration problem "Couldnt get a file descriptior referring to the console"

[Paul Johnson]

Greetings to everybody in r-sig-debian land.

I hope I have found the right place to ask this. If not, please refer me on...

I run R 2.9 on Ubuntu 9.04.   I believe many people have seen this
problem, but because the error message is hard to understand, they
have not traced it back to the R install in the distribution.  I think
it ought to be fixed in the R packaging process, but I do not know if
the problem begins with the Debian packaging or if someone at Ubuntu
has caused it.

As far as I can see, any program that tries to spawn a pdf viewer
fails with this somewhat uninformative error message:

> RShowDoc("frame", package="grid")
> Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console

I've traced this back to  a setting in /etc/R/Renviron:

## Default PDF viewer
R_PDFVIEWER=${R_PDFVIEWER-'/bin/open'}

That setting causes the trouble--if it is changed to a valid pdf
viewer, then the strange error message does not appear.  If your
system has the OpenDesktop mime system in place, this setting will
work:

# Default PDF viewer
R_PDFVIEWER=${R_PDFVIEWER-'/usr/bin/xdg-open'}

I've also learned that within a session a pdf viewer can be set with options:

options(pdfviewer = "evince")

Why does the existing configuration refer to /bin/open?  Can this be
fixed by the packager so that users don't have to make this change?


Here is the post that says this is a debian-sig issue:
http://www.nabble.com/Re:-unable-to-view-vignette-in-R-p20522903.html
And I believe this problem has existed for a long time because:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2007-September/141178.html
PJ

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas