[R] problems with rgl in Ubuntu 'gutsy'

[Foadi, J (James)]

Dear R users/gurus,
I have recently installed Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) on my Dell Latitude D520.
First time for me, as I have always used Fedora.

R installation using "apt" has proceeded fine, both for r-base and r-base-dev.

Next, I need to install various other packages, "rgl" being first in the line.
I have sorted some preliminaries by installing headers for X11 and Mesa:

 sudo apt-get install xorg-dev mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev

This stage went fine. Next, I invoked R using sudo:
 
 sudo R

and, from within R, I have installed rgl with:

 > install.packages("rgl")

This has downloaded and installed without any apparent problem. But, when I type
 
 > demo(rgl)

all rgl windows device do not show the outer frame, so I cannot move or resize the window.
In addition to that, the image is like "frozen", it can't be either rotated or shifted at all.

In short, rgl seems not to behave according to expectations. No error messages appear at any stage.

Has anyone a clue on what's going wrong here?

Many thanks,

J 

Dr James Foadi PhD
Membrane Protein Laboratory (MPL)
Diamond Light Source Ltd
Diamond House
Harewell Science and Innovation Campus
Chilton, Didcot
Oxfordshire OX11 0DE

Email    :  james.foadi at diamond.ac.uk
Alt Email:  j.foadi at imperial.ac.uk
Web Page :  http://

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