[R] generating graphical output when DISPLAY is not set?

[Petre Dimitrov]

Do you have libpng installed properly on your machine? It seems R is not linked against that library. Check the output of ./configure or config.log whether the check for libpng was succesfull. If not, go to www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html to download and install the relevant binary or source. Assuming you have Linux distro with rpm package management, you can download libpng-devel package from ftp.redhat.com or mirrors.

Once R is linked against that library, look at the help for png() for the proper way to redirect the plotting to a file.

Peter Dimitrov

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Cawley [mailto:simon_cawley at affymetrix.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2002 1:51 PM
To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: [R] generating graphical output when DISPLAY is not set?



Is it possible to generate graphical output (to a file) when the
DISPLAY environment variable is not set?  Here's the problem:

  $ unset DISPLAY
  $ R
  > png("foo.png")
  Error in X11(paste("png::", filename, sep = ""), width, height, pointsize,  :
          unable to start device PNG
  In addition: Warning message:
  unable to open connection to X11 display`'

I want to have a process running on a server call R to generate graphical
output, and the problem is that I'm not guaranteed to have a valid
DISPLAY set.  I have some clumsy workarounds, but it would be cleaner if
if I had some way to have R not require the DISPLAY.

Thanks,

-Simon

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