ReadMe file for building, installing and executing the AQUA - Darwin R GUI. Building R with Aqua GUI from Source: 0) You need C and Fortran compilers. See http://www.economia.unimi.it/R/ for some recommendations. 1) You can build the R with Aqua GUI either with or without X11 support, and with or without Tcl/Tk support. If you plan to use R under ESS you will want to have X11 support Without either X11 or Tcl/Tk: % ./configure --with-blas='-framework vecLib' --with-lapack --with-aqua --without-x With both: % ./configure --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, and the server, but not the SDK, is 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) R with Aqua GUI requires R to be built as a framework, which is default. Thus you need to install R as a framework with % sudo make install which installs, by default, the R framework inside /Library/Frameworks. You can change the R framework location at build-time specifying the flag --enable-R-framework[=DIR] at configure time or using the --prefix option in make install. The default is --enable-R-framework=/Library/Frameworks 3) To install the R with Aqua GUI you must have already installed the R framework. Type % make install-aqua Unless you have write permission to /Applications you will need an administrator password and sudo: % sudo make install-aqua After installation you can drag the R icon from Applications to anywhere else on the system. 3) To run R double-click on the R icon in /Applications, or drag it to the Dock and single-click it. Installing packages: ------------------- Binary packages are provided automatically at CRAN for any source package that compiles without human intervention. These can be installed from the Packages menu, and require no extra software Source packages can be installed but may need some extra tools: - For packages with no C or Fortran, R 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. The Bioconductor project provides its own installation system, which can be invoked from the Packages menu. Creating your own packages: --------------------------- The tar command in OS X 10.2 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. Eg % setenv TAR /sw/bin/tar Under 10.3 (Panther), GNU tar is the default tar and this is unnecessary. About the R with Aqua 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: 2004-3-13