Many thanks to Jari Oksanen and Jonathan Baron for very helpful comments on my enquiry about installing R from RPM in Red Hat 9, and the ensuing libtk problem. It does seem to be a slightly strange situation, and I have added some comments below in case they may be useful to others.
On 18-Sep-03 Jari Oksanen wrote: > libtk is a `Tk' library associated with `Tcl', and known collectively > as `Tcl/Tk' [...]. It is not installed automatically in RH, unless you > select kernel sources(!), neither can it be easily found with the > modern ``user-friendly'' interface. So you need to find the `tk' > package in your CD. I mounted each of the 3 CDs and finally found tk-8.3.5-88.i386.rpm on CD number 3! It's very true that the GUI does not easily reveal this, and indeed it only showed up under "kernel sources". This is bizarre, since Tcl/Tk is such a generally useful item. > Python, perl etc. have Tk-bindings for GUI building. So it is > surprising that RH does not install this automatically. Indeed! Next saga down the line: having found it, I opened up the RPM installer on it ( rpm -i /mnt/cdrom/tk-8.3.5-88.i386.rpm ) on it, only to find that 'rpm' went to sleep -- although there was now apparently a libtk library in /usr/lib, rpm did not finish off its job. So I opted for using the GUI interface accepting that the only way to install this rather small library via that route was to install the kernel sources as well; acceptable since this also gives you the kernel header files which can be needed if you're compiling other software. This worked! On 18-Sep-03 Jonathan Baron wrote: [...] > I vaguely recall that the requirement for tk and tcl was not > originally part of the RPM, but Martyn Plummer changed it because > people (like me) were complaining that Rcmdr (and perhaps other > packages) would not install without them. He also started > including "configure.log" so that you would know how he had made > the RPM. > > In the meantime, I had installed R from source, after making sure > that I had tcl and tk. This was quite easy (although it took a > while for everything to finish). So, I suggest that, if you do > not want to install tk, then you try installing from source. The > installation instructions come with the source code. I was thinking of going down that road, but in view of your commments, Jonathan, about Rcmdr etc. it may have been a good thing to make sure there would be no problems on that front. Anyway, after all that, R has now been installed and seems to be working well. Thanks! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 18-Sep-03 Time: 16:05:55 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help