The main problem is that Puppy Linux or whatever must have compiled
Sage without the right headers available.  It's entirely mysterious to
us exactly why R requires certain developer tools installed to give
you X11.  But it doesn't, and so in the spkg-install we check for as
many of these things as we know about.  However, the Puppy
installation probably doesn't have them all, so when it compiled R, it
did so without support for this.   Here is part of it (without some
comments):

if [ -f /usr/include/X11/Xwindows.h ]; then
    XSUPPORT=yes
else
   if [ "x`uname`" = xSunOS ] && [ -f /usr/X11/lib/libXv.so ] ; then
       XSUPPORT=yes
   else
       XSUPPORT=no
   fi
fi

On Mac we instead enable Aqua, because X11 support is very difficult
to implement for the general case (it depends heavily on version of OS
X).

So one solution would be to compile Sage from scratch (which is easy);
another is to download a binary built on a machine which had these
things.  We really wish there was a good solution to this, but
repeated requests on the R help list did not lead to further
elucidation.

Also, not all R packages behave nicely in this way - I've had trouble
installing ones that assumed access to certain things like OpenGL as
well.  But you are right that big ones like R Commander should be ok.

I'm not sure whether this will help, but it should help understand
what the problem is, anyway.

- kcrisman

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