Paul, On 15 June 2009 at 08:49, Paul Johnson wrote: | 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...
No this is the right place. So welcome! | I run R 2.9 on Ubuntu 9.04. That was 'a little underspecified'. "Whose R"? I.e. where did the binary come from? CRAN? Or from sources and you built it yourself? What is the architecture? [ Ok, I figured it out comparing amd64 (at work) to i386 (at home). My R-on-Ubuntu at home has the same problem. ] | 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'} On my Ubuntu system at work (amd64, 2.9.0 binaries from CRAN using Vicent and Michael's "Ubuntu re-builds" of my Debian packages) I have $ grep -i pdf /etc/R/Renviron R_PDFLATEXCMD=${R_PDFLATEXCMD-${PDFLATEX-'/usr/bin/pdflatex'}} R_RD4PDF=${R_RD4PDF-'times,hyper'} ## Default PDF viewer R_PDFVIEWER=${R_PDFVIEWER-'/usr/bin/xpdf'} $ The '/usr/bin/xpdf' is actually an explicit setting, and we ensure xpdf is present at built time. On my Ubuntu system at home (i386, binaries from CRAN as well) I have the same problem you diagnosed. Now, I don;t use that machine much for R so I never noticed... This seems to be a genuine bug in the i386 CRAN builds, and I trust Vincent and Michael will try to fix it. | 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") See help(Startup) -- you can also make that 'permanent' via the files in either $(HOME) or below /etc/R/. | 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? We sure should try to fix it, esp as it comes from a pre-packaged binary. Thanks, Dirk | 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 -- Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions. _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Debian mailing list R-SIG-Debian@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian