ReadMe file for building, installing and executing the AQUA - Darwin R GUI. Building RAqua from Source: 0) You need C and Fortran compilers. See http://www.economia.unimi.it/R/ for some recommendations. 1) You can build the RAqua GUI either with or without X11 support, and with or without Tcl/Tk support. Without either X11 or Tcl/Tk: % ./configure --enable-R-shlib --with-blas='-framework vecLib' --with-lapack --with-aqua --without-x With both: % ./configure --enable-R-shlib --with-blas='-framework vecLib' --with-lapack --with-aqua provided that you have built and installed tk and tcl from the unix tree of the respective sources. Then build R with % make Compiling with X11 support requires X11 header files (SDK, as Apple calls it) and running with X11 support requires an X server, such as Apple's Xquartz server (http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/download/). The X server is shipped with Panther along with the SDK. The latter is not installed by default. Compiling with Tcl/Tk requires the X11 implementation of the libraries. See http://www.economia.unimi.it/R/ for more information on where to get it and how to install it. 2) To install the RAqua GUI type % make install-aqua Unless you have write permission to /Applications you will need an administrator password and sudo: % sudo make install-aqua 3) double-click on the StartR icon in /Applications, or drag it to the Dock and single-click it. Installing packages: Binary packages will be provided by the time RAqua is released. Source packages can be installed but may need some extra stuff: - For packages with no C or Fortran, RAqua is sufficient. - For packages with C but not Fortran the Apple developer toolkit is sufficient Otherwise see http://www.economia.unimi.it/R/ for details. Creating packages: The tar command in OS X is missing some features that are used by R CMD build. At the moment the recommended work-around is to install GNU tar (eg, as part of fink) and set the TAR environment variable to point to GNU tar. Under Panther, GNU tar is the default tar. Eg setenv TAR /sw/bin/tar About the RAqua GUI: The GUI has separate input and output windows. What you type goes into the small input window, and the output goes in the large window above. You can change the colors and font sizes in Preferences. The output window is buffered: it may not update until the previous command is finished. This makes output of large objects much faster. You can turn off buffering and adjust the size of the buffer in Preferences. Help pages display in separate pop-up windows, and HTML help is also available in your browser. The standard graphics driver for RAqua is quartz(), using the Quartz PDF-based display engine. It has all the features you would expect in an R device driver. If you compiled with X11 support and have an X server running you can also use x11() for the X-Windows display device. Of course, all the usual file-based devices are available: PDF(), postscript(), xfig(), etc. Data frames can be displayed and edited with data.entry() and edit(). The Workspace menu allows the Workspace to be saved, loaded, cleared or browsed. The workspace browser can also be started with the browseEnv() function. The Tools window manages the command history and working directory. The Packages menu allows you to install packages from CRAN and Bioconductor, to see what packages are currently installed, and to load and unload packages and load data sets. Notes for developers: Nearly everything is in src/modules/aqua/. At the moment the main exception is the quartz device driver, which is in src/unix/ but may move soon. The Console is based on the Carbon MLTE system. It is in modules/aqua/aquaconsole.c. There are two TXNObjects, one for the input window and one for the output window. The MLTE engine is documented in the Apple Developer Toolkit: /Developer/Documentation/Carbon/Text/MultiLingualTextEngine The package manager, data set manager, install browsers, and workspace browser are DataBrowser controls: http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2009.html Menus, and windows other than the data browsers are constructed from specifications in modules/aqua/Contents/Resources/main.nib, which can be edited with the Interface Builder. Beware of code that assumes Unix systems are X11-based. For example, edit.data.frame() used to assume that a Unix system with no DISPLAY variable must not have a GUI. Check .Platform$GUI=="AQUA" in interpreted code or !strcmp(R_GUIType,"AQUA") in C. There's a lot of coding based on static variables in the aqua files. If you can't find a local declaration for a variable look at the top of the file. This version: nov 19th 2003