[R] Problems with installing the rgl package on Linux

[Paul Smith]

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 5:33 PM, George N. White III
<aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca> wrote:
>  > 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.

Thanks, George and Tim. The following command installed the missing packages:

yum groupinstall "X Software Development"

Afterwards, I could install the rlg package, without further trouble.

Paul