[R-SIG-Mac] R 4.1 for my Mac M1 crashing on installing packages

[Jeroen Ooms]

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 11:34 AM Renato Morais
<renatomoraisaraujo using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm new here, so please forgive my clumsy error reporting.
>
> I have just downloaded *R-4.1-branch.pkg* for my Mac M1, as I wanted to
> finally enjoy a native normal-speed R (for some reason running v 4.0.5 on
> Rosetta was extremely slow on my machine). I also installed the latest
> XQuartz, as indicated (v 2.8.1).
>
> Sad story is, when I try a simple install.packages command, it first
> appears to ignore me, after returning 'Please select a CRAN mirror for use
> in this session'. if I insist, it crashes. No useful error messages. Trying
> via the Package Installer tab didn't work either. It doesn't find any
> packages, indeed it crashes if I ask it to load the list.

This indeed sounds like an xQuartz issue, failing to popup the mirror
selection menu. Does everything work if you manually set your CRAN
mirror first, e.g:

  options(repos=c(CRAN="https://cloud.r-project.org"))

Alternatively you can disable the popup menus all-together using:

  options(menu.graphics=FALSE)

Which should probably be the default.