[R] Error in X11(paste("png::", filename, sep = ""), width, height, pointsize unable to start device PNG

[Marc Schwartz]

On Sat, 2005-12-31 at 12:30 +1100, paul sorenson wrote:
> Marc Schwartz wrote:
> > ...
> > On a side note, RH9 is a fairly dated and EOL'd distribution, with
> > security updates and bug patches only provided by the Fedora Legacy
> > folks (http://fedoralegacy.org). You should consider upgrading to Fedora
> > in the near future (if you want to stay with RH), since the FL folks can
> > drop support for RH9 at any time, leaving you vulnerable.
> 
> Yes but also don't do this naively.  You might find that gcc 4 breaks 
> some of your source compilations and IIRC this is the default compiler 
> if you install FC4 with the "install everything" option.  I haven't 
> tried compiling R with gcc 4, this is just a general comment.

I do know that Prof. Ripley, Peter Dalgaard and Martyn Plummer have
spent a fair amount of time on this issue and there are notes in the
R-admin manual regarding some of the gcc 4.x problems.

There were also various discussions on r-devel and offlist over the past
several months about these issues, later including Tom Callaway from Red
Hat, who is the Fedora Extras package maintainer for the R offerings in
those repos. These had to do with the various compiler, optimization
flag and later BLAS/LAPACK issues.

The current gcc version on a fully updated FC4 system is:

$ gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.0.2 20051125 (Red Hat 4.0.2-8)

and I believe solves the prior issues related to 4.0.0. R compiles fine
on my fully updated FC4 system and passes 'make check all' without
error.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz