INSTALLING R UNDER UNIX GENERALITIES R will configure and build under a number of common Unix platforms including dec-alpha-osf, freebsd, hpux, linux-elf, sgi-irix, solaris, and sunos. In general it is relatively easy to adapt R to new platforms. See below for details. SIMPLE COMPILATION Choose a place to install the R tree (R is not just a binary, but has additional data sets, help files, font metrics etc). Let's call this place RHOME. Untar the source code. This should create directories src, etc, cmd, help and doc. Issue the following commands: ./configure make If these commands execute successfully, the R binary will be copied to the `$RHOME/bin' directory. In addition, a shell script font-end called "R" will be created and copied to the same directory. You can copy this script to a place where users can invoke it, for example to `/usr/local/bin/R'. You could also copy the man page `R.1' to a place where your man reader finds it, such as `/usr/local/man/man1'. If you want to install the complete R tree to, e.g., /usr/local/lib/R, see section INSTALLATION below. If you need or want to set certain configure variables to something other than their default, you can do that by either editing the file `config.site' or on the command line as VAR="..." ./configure # Bourne shell compatibles (setenv VAR "..."; ./configure) # C shell One common variable to change is R_PAPERSIZE, which defaults to a4, not letter. If you have libraries and header files, e.g. for GNU readline, in non-system directories, use the variables LIBS (for libraries) and CPPFLAGS (for header files), respectively, to specify these locations. Make will also build plain text help pages as well as HTML and LaTeX versions of the documentation (the three kinds can also be generated separately using make help, make html and make latex). Note that as of R version 0.60, you need Perl version 5 to build the documentation. If this is not available on your system, you can obtain precompiled documentation files via the `doc/pre-formatted-help' directory of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), see the file `RESOURCES' for information on CRAN. Now rehash if necessary, type `R' and reach for your S manuals ... And, read the R FAQ (http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html). INSTALLATION After ./configure make have been completed successfully, you can install the complete R tree to your system by typing make install This will install to the following directories: $prefix/bin (some) executables $prefix/man/man1 man pages $prefix/lib/R all the rest (libraries, online help system, ...) where prefix is determined during configuration (typically /usr/local) and can be set by running configure with the option ./configure --prefix=/where/you/want/R/to/go The prefix of the installation directories can also be seen in the status message that is displayed at the end of configure. You do not necessarily have to build R in the top-level source directory (say, TOP_SRCDIR). To build in BUILDDIR, cd there and run TOP_SRCDIR/configure make and so on, as described further above. This has the advantage of always keeping your source tree `clean'. USING FORTRAN To compile R, you need a FORTRAN compiler or f2c, the FORTRAN-to-C converter. The default is to search for f77, g77, fort77, f90, xlf, cf77, and fc (in that order), and then for f2c, and use whichever is found first; if none is found, R cannot be compiled. The search mechanism can be changed using the `--with-g77', `--with-f77', and `--with-f2c' command line options to configure. If your FORTRAN compiler is in a non-standard location, you should set the enviroment vaiable PATH accordingly before running configure. TWO-LEVEL MAKE If you don't need to supply any special arguments to "configure", you can actually build R simply by typing "make", which will automatically run "configure" if the configuration files are absent. Since the build process depends on the results of "configure", the top-level Makefile does little more than passing control to Makefile.2nd after ensuring that "configure" has been run. This has the curious, but harmless, consequence that "make distclean" and the like may run "configure" and remove the configuration files a moment later. This looks odd, but is fairly hard to avoid. NEW PLATFORMS (Standards Hah!) There are a number of sources of problems when installing R on a new hardware/os platform. 1. Floating Point Arithmetic: R supports the POSIX, SVID and IEEE models for floating point arithmetic. The POSIX and SVID models provide no problems. The IEEE model however can be a pain. The problem is that there is no agreement on how to set the signalling behavior; sgi/irix and linux require no special action, freebsd requires a call to (the macro) fpsetmask(0) and osf1v3.2 requires that computation be done with a -ieee_with_inexact flag etc... On a new platform you must find out the magic recipe and add some code to make it work. This can often be done via the file config.site which resides in the top level directory. 2. Shared Libraries: There seems to be very little agreement across platforms on what needs to be done to build shared libraries. there are many different combinations of flags for the compilers and loaders. The technique we use is to interrogate the X window system about what it does (using xmkmf). This often works, but you may have to manually override the results. Scanning the cc(1) and ld(1) manual entries usually reveals the correct incantation. Once you know the recipe you can modify the file config.site (following the instructions therein) so that the build will use these options. If you do manage to get R running on a new platform please let us know about it so we can modify the configuration procedures to include that platform. If you are having trouble getting R to work on your platform please feel free to get in touch to ask questions. We've had a fair amount of practice at porting R to new platforms... R Core Members