[R-sig-teaching] installing Rcmdr

[G. Jay Kerns]

Dear Robert,


On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 9:24 PM, Robert W. Hayden <hayden at mv.mv.com> wrote:
>
> Last weekend I visited my sister and her husband and installed R on
> their Ubuntu 8.04 machine and tried to add Rcmdr.  I had endless
> trouble most of which seemed to be because R (or Rcmdr) seemed to want
> a Fortran compiler (or a Fortran-to-C translator).  A smaller number
> of error mesages (out of many pages thereof) were removed by
> installing what appeared to be a library of Fortran linear algebra
> routines (lblas?).  Even then Rcmdr complained about missing packages
> when I ran it, and though it offered to install them, the installation
> failed in every case, with no useful error messages.
>
> I have installed R and Rcmdr many times before to Windows and various
> Linux distributions (it's on this Debian right now)  and never had so
> much trouble.  Did I do something wrong?  Is there a problem with R on
> Ubuntu?  I have programmed in Fortran so I don't mind adding a
> compiler and I've taught linear algebra so I don't mind adding linear
> algebra routines, but there is no way my students would ever figure
> out that was needed.  I also noted that Rcmdr had a MUCH longer list
> of dependencies than I remember.  All of this has me worried about
> using R in an introductory course for folks who are not computer
> science majors.
>
> Has anyone encountered a similar problem?  I used whatever version of
> R is in the Ubuntu repository.  I seem to remember 2.4 though that
> seems a bit old.
>
> ------->  First-time AP Stats. teacher?  Help is on the way! See
>
>  http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html
>
>  Robert W. Hayden in the old library at  212 Main Street (P. O. Box 450)
>  North Troy, VT 05859  phone (802) 988-2587  web site http://statland.org/
>  email  bob statland.org  (add your own "@" and save me some spam)
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-sig-teaching at r-project.org mailing list
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>


I am and have been using Rcmdr on Ubuntu 7.10, 8.04, and currently on
8.10.  I used 32 bit Ubuntu for 7.10 and 8.04, but on 8.10 I am using
both 32 and 64 bit versions. For the record, I have had no problems
whatsoever installing Rcmdr.

First thought (and you didn't mention): are you sure that you have the
r-base-dev Ubuntu package installed?  If you do not have that
installed, then you won't be able to build _anything_.

If you already have r-base-dev....? it is good practice to install the
packages from the repository with Synaptic (which it sounds like is
what you did), since in those cases, dependencies are marked
automatically for installation most of the time.    Another thing that
you could try is to right-click on packages in Synaptic - it gives
other packages "suggested" for installation.  In some cases,
installing these extra packages helped me with installation problems
elsewhere, too.

And you could consider contacting John Fox directly.  He's great about
responding quickly, thoughtfully, and accurately.

Good luck.
Jay









***************************************************
G. Jay Kerns, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics & Statistics
Youngstown State University
Youngstown, OH 44555-0002 USA
Office: 1035 Cushwa Hall
Phone: (330) 941-3310 Office (voice mail)
-3302 Department
-3170 FAX
E-mail: gkerns at ysu.edu
http://www.cc.ysu.edu/~gjkerns/