[R-SIG-Mac] Tcl/Tk Problems

[Simon Urbanek]

On May 22, 2008, at 12:08 PM, Paul Roebuck wrote:

> On Thu, 8 May 2008, [Windows-1252] Mónica Lozano wrote:
>
>> I'm beginning to work on mac.
>> I think that R was successfully installed. I'm working
>> with Rclimex, so i need a few packages (ismev, extRemes)
>> to work with, but it also need Tcl/Tk. I reed in FAQ
>> that it sometimes generates a problem so you have to
>> type: Sys.setenv(DISPLAYS=":0") this worked the first
>> time and no more.
>> Now when I try to load any of the packages, even Tcl/Tk
>> this show up:
>> Loading Tcl/Tk interface ... Error in fun(...) :
>> couldn't connect to display ":0"
>> Error : .onLoad failed in 'loadNamespace' for 'tcltk'
>> Error: package/namespace load failed for 'tcltk'
>> So I don't know what else to do.
>
> Sys.setenv(DISPLAY=":0.0")
> library(tcltk)
>

That won't work (see that display is set already).

Mónica, it all depends on the Mac OS X version you're using. If you  
have Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) then you should *not* set DISPLAY because  
Leopard uses a special trick to start X11 that doesn't work when you  
change DISPLAY. So on Leopard, make sure DISPLAY is not touched (it  
will look somewhat like "/tmp/launch-RfCsdFs/:0").

However, if you have an older OS version (e.g. Tiger = Mac OS X 10.4),  
then you need to start X11 first and then set DISPLAY to ":0" (or ": 
0.0" it doesn't matter).

If you still have problems, please specify exactly which OS X version  
you are using, how you installed X11 and what machine you're using.

Thanks,
Simon