[R] Using R under Ubuntu...

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 27 April 2008 at 10:57, Brian Lunergan wrote:
| My apologies for not explaining myself clearly but yes, that's more or 
| less the mark I was aiming for. I suppose the Linux purists would think 
| less of me, but I am more comfortable in a graphic workspace. Should be 
| possible, shouldn't it? ;-)

While you need to consider the FAQ's strong endorsement of Emacs + ESS, your
best bet for a grpahical GUI is probably JGR.  The Java side of things keeps
changing, and (as far as I know) we do not yet have a completely 'free' (in
the usual sense) set of tools to build JGR or I would have added JGR to
Debian a long time ago.

That said, I did build JGR before on some of my Ubuntu or Debian machines.  I
do forget the details, but in a nutshell you need  

-- one the Java 'java development kits', either 
       sun-java5-sdk or
       sun-java6-sdk 
   [ and there is an outside change that 
       icedtea-java7-jdk 
     may also work, but I am not sure ]
   where any one of these is just an 'sudo apt-get install ...' away

-- then tell R that you have Java via
       sudo R CMD javareconf
   and check the output for sanity -- it may get confused if you also have
   Java bits of gcc like gij or gcj installed

-- now that you have Java and R knows it, start R via sudo (so that you can
   write to /usr/local) and then do
       install.packages("JGR", libs="/usr/local/lib/R/site-library", repos="http://cran.ca.r-project.org", dependencies=TRUE)
   which should install rJava and JGR for you.

Let us know how it goes, and maybe bring follow-up questions to the dedicated
list r-sig-debian (which also covers Ubuntu), but note that you need to
subscribe there in order to post.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.