[R-sig-Debian] rgl, openmesa, nvidia. Oh my!

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 21 September 2009 at 20:42, Paul Johnson wrote:
| I've caused a new problem for myself.  I wonder if you have seen it.
| On Ubuntu 9.04 I had a lot of hangs with the nvidia packages and so I
| updated to the 185 edition on this website:
| 
| https://launchpad.net/~nvidia-vdpau/+archive/ppa
| 
| The video drivers are much better!  However, I notice now I don't have
| all of the working pieces of the X11/openGL development toolkit in
| order to compile R packages like "rgl".  I'm pretty uninformed about
| Ubuntu: exactly what parts are supposed to be supplied by X11 and Mesa
| versus the nvidia packages.  Maybe  you have a suggestion?

I use an older Nvidia NVS280 card to drive a dual-display setup.  For a few
years now, I have simply relied on Ubuntu to 'Do the Right Thing' -- new
kernel packages automagically re-build kernel modules etc pp. Works pretty
well -- and with Ubuntu 9,04 I even got OpenGL on both displays so even
Google Earth works. As does 'library(rgl); demo(rgl)'.  But that won't help
you if you have issues with your card....

| Here's the failure of the rgl install
| 
| > install.packages("rgl")

What is wrong with  "sudo apt-get install r-cran-rgl"  ?

I have mainted rgl inside Debian / Ubuntu for a few years just because
keeping track of OpenGL etc headers is tricky.

For what it is worth, the package has these Build-Depends:

    	Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 5.0.0), r-base-dev (>= 2.9.2), cdbs, 
    	libgl1-mesa-dev | libgl-dev, libglu1-mesa-dev | libglu-dev,
    	libpng12-dev, libx11-dev, libxt-dev, x11proto-core-dev 

so if you satisfy these you should be able to build the package ... as that
is what the autobuilders do.

FWIW my Nvidia packages are 

edd at joe:~$ COLUMNS=78 dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia | grep "^ii"
ii  nvidia-173-ker 173.14.16-0ubu NVIDIA binary kernel module source
ii  nvidia-173-mod 173.14.16-0ubu Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org drive
ii  nvidia-177-mod 177.82-0ubuntu Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org drive
ii  nvidia-180-lib 180.44-0ubuntu Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix
ii  nvidia-180-mod 180.44-0ubuntu Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org drive
ii  nvidia-71-moda 71.86.08-0ubun Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org drive
ii  nvidia-96-moda 96.43.10-0ubun Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org drive
ii  nvidia-common  0.2.11         Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers
ii  nvidia-glx-173 173.14.16-0ubu NVIDIA binary Xorg driver
ii  nvidia-kernel- 96.43.05-0ubun NVIDIA binary kernel module for Linux 2.6.27
ii  nvidia-kernel- 20080825+1ubun NVIDIA binary kernel module common files
ii  nvidia-setting 180.25-0ubuntu Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driv
edd at joe:~$

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.