[R-sig-Debian] libreadline problem

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 18 August 2010 at 11:36, Giovanni Petris wrote:
| Hello,
| 
| Recently updated Ubuntu to 10.04, I have installed the r-base and
| r-base-dev packages from CRAN with 
| 
| sudo apt-get install r-base
| 
| But now when I want to start R I get the following error:
| 
| gpetris at definetti:~$ R
| /usr/lib/R/bin/exec/R: symbol lookup
| error: /usr/local/lib/libreadline.so.6: undefined symbol: PC
| 
| Any clue??? Has anybody seen that before? I have tried to reinstall the
| readline libraries, both as a ubuntu package and from sources, but the
| error did not go away....

There must be some local issue on your system that makes it non-standard.
There are literally hundreds of us running this R version and built every day
from the same binaries.

The best clue is 

    error: /usr/local/lib/libreadline.so.6: undefined symbol: PC

which clearly indicates that you have a version of readline masquerading as
version 6 ... which is then used to run R but fails for incompatibility.

That is, sorry to be blunt, your fault and issue.  Remove that library (with
some care, you could first rename or move to a hidden directory) and then run
'sudo ldconfig' to update the shared library cache used by the system. Then
try R.  Or, as an alternative to running R:

edd at max:~$ ldd /usr/lib/R/bin/exec/R
	linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007fff24c72000)
	libR.so => /usr/lib/libR.so (0x00007f828a3fe000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f828a07b000)
	libblas.so.3gf => /usr/lib/libblas.so.3gf (0x00007f8289ddf000)
	libgfortran.so.3 => /usr/lib/libgfortran.so.3 (0x00007f8289af2000)
	libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x00007f828986f000)
	libreadline.so.6 => /lib/libreadline.so.6 (0x00007f828962d000)
	libpcre.so.3 => /lib/libpcre.so.3 (0x00007f82893ff000)
	libbz2.so.1.0 => /lib/libbz2.so.1.0 (0x00007f82891ee000)
	libz.so.1 => /lib/libz.so.1 (0x00007f8288fd6000)
	libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f8288dd2000)
	/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f828a994000)
	libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f8288bbb000)
	libncurses.so.5 => /lib/libncurses.so.5 (0x00007f8288977000)
edd at max:~$ 

As you can, nothing is pulled in from /usr/local and I run R against the
libraries provided by the package management system as it was meant to be
used.

You should get there too.

Hth, Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com