[R-sig-Debian] "Buffer overflow" updating and installing packages...

[Michael Rutter]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 8:52 PM, Edin Villalobos Mora <edivimo at yahoo.es> wrote:
> Good evenings. I am a novice in R and I have a big problem updating and
> installing packages inside R in Ubuntu 10.10  I followed the instructions in
> http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian/ :
>
> *Added a new repository in Ubuntu : http://cran-r.c3sl.ufpr.br/bin/linux/ubuntu
> maverick/
> *update the r-base and r-base-dev packages
> *Enter R with "sudo"
>
> The R version is right [R version 2.12.2 (2011-02-25)] but commands in the R
> console like 'install.packages("pwr")' or install.packages("agricolae") fail
> with the message "*** buffer overflow detected ***: /usr/lib/R/bin/exec/R
> terminated" and a long backtrace and memory map in both cases.
> I tought that the reason was because the above packages are not kept up-to-date
> like r-cran packages, but I type the 'update.packages()' command with the
> supported packages and the "buffer overflow"backtrace-memory-map message appears
> again in the 13 updates of the supported packages (like boot, nlme, lattice,
> etc).

Edin,

One thing to do is to make sure all your packages have installed
correctly.  Run this command:

sudo apt-get -f install

This may correct the problem.  Also, are you running 32 or 64 bit
Ubuntu?  I have not encountered any a buffer overflow issue on any of
my machines, so this may prove difficult to diagnose.  Does the buffer
overflow (when running update.packages()) occur before or after the
window pops up to ask what mirror you want to use?

Michael

-- 
Dr. Michael A. Rutter
School of Science
Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
Station Road
Erie, PA 16563
http://math.bd.psu.edu/faculty/rutter