[R] Problems with installing the rgl package on Linux

[George N. White III]

On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Paul Smith wrote:

> Dear All,
> 
> I am trying to install the rgl package on R 2.6.1 running on Fedora 8
> (Linux), but I am experiencing the following problems:
> 
> -----------------------------------------
> configure: error: X11 not found but required, configure aborted.
> ERROR: configuration failed for package 'rgl'
> ** Removing '/usr/lib/R/library/rgl'
> -----------------------------------------
> 
> Any ideas?

It worked for me (R-2.6.2 from the CRAN packages).  Such problems are generally 
due to missing '-devel' packages. Unfortunately, figuring out which package is 
missing can be problematic. If you have fast internet and ample disk, look at 
the "Package Manager" + "Browse" + "Development" for missing entries in 
"Development Libraries" and "X Software Development". On my system, 32 of 34 
packages (all but libcurl and libusb) under "Development Libraries" and 41 of 
46 packages under "X .." (all but icon-*, libXp, xorg-X11-server, 
xorg-X11-xbitmaps) have been installed.

If you need to be economical about installing additional packages,
you will need to extract the sources for rgl, built it manually,
figure out what was missing (usually a .h file), figure out which
library contains the missing file, install, and repeat.  It would
be useful to have a R-devdeps rpm that simply contains a list of
dependencies on commonly required -devel packages, but of course there
will still be problems with packages that use uncommonly required
libs.

-- 
George N. White III  <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca> <gnwiii at gmail.com>