Greetings to everybody in r-sig-debian land. I hope I have found the right place to ask this. If not, please refer me on...
I run R 2.9 on Ubuntu 9.04. I believe many people have seen this problem, but because the error message is hard to understand, they have not traced it back to the R install in the distribution. I think it ought to be fixed in the R packaging process, but I do not know if the problem begins with the Debian packaging or if someone at Ubuntu has caused it. As far as I can see, any program that tries to spawn a pdf viewer fails with this somewhat uninformative error message: > RShowDoc("frame", package="grid") > Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console I've traced this back to a setting in /etc/R/Renviron: ## Default PDF viewer R_PDFVIEWER=${R_PDFVIEWER-'/bin/open'} That setting causes the trouble--if it is changed to a valid pdf viewer, then the strange error message does not appear. If your system has the OpenDesktop mime system in place, this setting will work: # Default PDF viewer R_PDFVIEWER=${R_PDFVIEWER-'/usr/bin/xdg-open'} I've also learned that within a session a pdf viewer can be set with options: options(pdfviewer = "evince") Why does the existing configuration refer to /bin/open? Can this be fixed by the packager so that users don't have to make this change? Here is the post that says this is a debian-sig issue: http://www.nabble.com/Re:-unable-to-view-vignette-in-R-p20522903.html And I believe this problem has existed for a long time because: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2007-September/141178.html PJ -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Debian mailing list R-SIG-Debian@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian