[R] tcltk on Windows 98

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001 Setzer.Woodrow at epamail.epa.gov wrote:

> I've written an application that uses the tcltk package, and have
> distributed it to a few people to use here in the Agency on Windows 98
> machines.  It has worked just fine on all but one of those machines.  On
> that one (system information quoted below), we persist in getting the error
> message:
>
> > require (tcltk)
> Loading required package: tcltk
> Error in dyn.load(x, as.logical(local), as.logical(now)) :
>         unable to load shared library
> "C:/PROGRA~1/R/RW1021/library/tcltk/libs/TclTk.dll":
>   LoadLibrary failure:  One of the library files needed to run this
> application cannot be found.
> [1] FALSE
>
> TCL_LIBRARY is set (when it is not, the error message is different), and we
> have reinstalled Windows 98, tcltk, and R at least once.  The above path
> points to tcltk.dll (yes, there is a difference in capitalization, but I
> don't think that is supposed to matter on Windows -- it doesn't on my
> system, anyway).
>
> Has anyone else seen this problem, and have a fix?  Is there a way to get a
> list of library files required by a dll?

pedump.exe (in the tools.zip as mentioned in readme.packages) will tell
you.  If you have VC++, dumpbin /imports will too.

My guess is that Tcl/Tk is installed but not correctly in the PATH.
The Tcl installer is supposed to do that, but I have seen it fail.
I am fairly sure this an Tcl not R problem.
What I suggest you do is

Uninstall Tcl/Tk
clean up autoexec.bat's version of the PATH
Install Tcl/Tk
Reboot
Check that tcl83.dll and tk83.dll (from memory) are on the PATH
Try again.

Good luck!

This has happened to me, and I don't really know why it worked eventually.
This is one of the many reasons why I just don't allow Windows 95/98/ME
locally.  NT/2000 gives a useful error message saying exactly what it was
looking for and where.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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