This is a guide to installation and administration for R.
The current version of this document is 1.7.1 (2003-06-16). ISBN 3-901167-52-8
Sources, binaries and documentation for R can be obtained via
CRAN, the "Comprehensive R Archive Network". See the file
RESOURCES
in the R distribution for information on
CRAN.
The simplest way is to download the most recent
R-x.y.z.tgz
file, and unpack it with
tar xvfz R-x.y.z.tgz
on systems that have GNU tar
installed. On other systems you
need at least to have the gzip
program installed. Then you
can use
gzip -dc R-x.y.z.tgz | tar xvf -
If you need to transport the sources on floppy disks, you can download
the R-x.y.z.tgz-split.*
files and paste them
together at the destination with (Unix)
cat R-x.y.z-split.* > R-x.y.z.tgz
and proceed as above. If you want the build to be usable by a group of
users, set umask
before unpacking so that the files will be
readable by the target group (e.g., umask 022
to be usable by all
users).
Sources are also available via anonymous rsync. Use
rsync -rC rsync.r-project.org::module R
to create a copy of the source tree specified by module in the
subdirectory R
of the current directory, where module
specifies one of the four existing flavors of the R sources, and can be
one of r-release
(current released version), r-patched
(patched released version), and r-devel
(development version).
(These flavors are described in the R FAQ,
http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/.) The rsync trees are
created directly from the master CVS archive and are updated hourly.
The -C
option in the rsync
command is to cause it to
skip the CVS directories. Further information on rsync
is
available at http://rsync.samba.org/rsync/.
R will configure and build under a number of common Unix platforms including i386-freebsd, cpu-linux-gnu for the i386, alpha, arm, hppa, ia64, m68k, powerpc, and sparc CPUs (see e.g. http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?&pkg=r-base), i386-sun-solaris, powerpc-apple-darwin, mips-sgi-irix, alpha-dec-osf4, rs6000-ibm-aix, hppa-hp-hpux, and sparc-sun-solaris.
In addition, binary distributions are available for most common Linux distributions, and for MacOS X (Darwin) with X11. See the FAQ for current details. These are installed in platform-specific ways. So for the rest of this chapter we consider only building from the sources.
First review the essential and useful tools and libraries in Essential and useful other programs, and install those you want or need.
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 us call
this place R_HOME. Untar the source code. This should create
directories src
, doc
, and several more. Issue the
following commands:
./configure make
(See Using make if your make is not called make
.)
Then check the built system works correctly, by
make check
Failures are not necessarily problems as they might be caused by missing functionality, but you should look carefully at any reported discrepancies. To re-run the tests you would need
make check FORCE=FORCE
More comprehensive testing can be done by
make check-devel
or
make check-all
see tests/README
.
If these commands execute successfully, the R binary will be copied
to the R_HOME/bin
directory. In addition, a shell-script
front-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 Installation.
Note: you do not need to install R: you can run it from where
it was built.
You do not necessarily have to build R in the top-level source
directory (say, TOP_SRCDIR
). To build in
BUILDDIR
, run
cd BUILDDIR TOP_SRCDIR/configure make
and so on, as described further below. This has the advantage of always
keeping your source tree "clean". (You may need GNU make
to
allow this.)
Make will also build plain text help pages as well as HTML and
LaTeX versions of the R object documentation (the three kinds can
also be generated separately using make help
, make html
and make latex
). Note that you need Perl version 5: if this is
not available on your system, you can obtain PDF versions of the
documentation files via CRAN.
Now rehash
if necessary, type R, and read the R manuals
and the R FAQ (files FAQ
or
doc/html/faq.html
, or
http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html which always has
the latest version).
There is a set of manuals that can be built from the sources,
refman
R-FAQ
R-intro
R-data
R-admin
R-exts
R-lang
To make these, use
make dvi to create DVI versions
make pdf to create PDF versions
make info to create info files (not refman
).
You will not be able to build the info files unless you have
makeinfo
version 4 or later installed (and some Linux
distributions have 3.12).
The DVI versions can be previewed and printed using standard programs
such as xdvi
and dvips
. The PDF versions can be
viewed using Acrobat Reader or (recent versions of) ghostscript: they
have hyperlinks that can be followed in Acrobat Reader. The info files
are suitable for reading online with Emacs or the standalone GNU Info.
After
./configure make make check
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
prefix/man/man1
prefix/lib/R
where prefix is determined during configuration (typically
/usr/local
) and can be set by running configure
with
the option --prefix
, as in
./configure --prefix=/where/you/want/R/to/go
This causes make install
to install the R executable to
/where/you/want/R/to/go/bin
, and so on. The prefix of the
installation directories can be seen in the status message that is
displayed at the end of configure
. You can install into
another directory by using
make prefix=/path/to/here install
To install DVI, info and PDF versions of the manuals, use one or more of
make install-dvi make install-info make install-pdf
To ensure that the installed tree is usable by the right group of users,
set umask
appropriately (perhaps to 022
) before unpacking
the sources and throughout the build process.
The bin/windows
directory of a CRAN site contains
binaries for a base distribution and a large number of add-on packages
from CRAN to run on Windows 95, 98, NT4, 2000, ME and XP (at
least) on Intel and clones (but not on other platforms).
You do need one of those Windows versions: Windows 3.11+win32s will not work.
Your file system must allow long file names (as is likely except perhaps for some network-mounted systems).
The simplest way is to use rw1071.exe
or
miniR.exe
. Just double-click on the icon and follow the
instructions. If you installed R this way you can uninstall it from the
Control Panel.
See the R Windows FAQ for more details.
If you want to build this port from the sources, see the file
src/gnuwin32/INSTALL
in the source distribution. You will need
to collect, install and test an extensive set of tools: see
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/ for the current locations.
You may need to compile under a case-honouring file system: we found
that a samba
-mounted file system (which maps all file names to
lower case) did not work. Open a commands window at a directory whose
path does not contain spaces, and run something like
tar zxvf R-1.7.1.tgz cd R-1.7.1\src\gnuwin32 make
sit back and wait (for about 5 minutes on 1GHz PIII with a fast local disc).
For further details, including how to make the documentation and how to
cross-compile, see src/gnuwin32/INSTALL
.
The bin/macos
directory of a CRAN site contains
bin-hex
ed (hqx
) and stuffit
(sit
)
archives for a base distribution and a large number of add-on packages
to run under MacOS 8.6 to MacOS 9.1 or MacOS X natively. Just extract
one of these archives in a suitable folder using standard utilities like
Aladdin Stuffit Expander (tm).
There is also a port to MacOS X which is considered to be a Unix variant
in this document. You can find it in the bin/macosx
directory at
of a CRAN site.
This chapter applies to Unix-like and Windows versions of R, but not to the Classic MacOS port.
It is helpful to use the correct terminology. A package is
loaded from a library by the function library()
. Thus a
library is a directory containing installed packages; the main library
is R_HOME/library
, but others can be used, for example by
setting the environment variable R_LIBS
or using the R function
.libPaths()
.
Packages may be distributed in source form or compiled binary form. Installing source packages requires that compilers and tools (including Perl 5.004 or later) be installed. Binary packages are platform specific and generally need no special tools to install, but see the documentation for your platform for details.
Note that you need to specify implicitly or explicitly the library to which the package is to be installed. This is only an issue if you have more than one library, of course.
To install packages from source on Unix use
R CMD INSTALL -l /path/to/library pkg1 pkg2 ...
The part -l /path/to/library
can be omitted, in which case the
first library in R_LIBS
is used if set, otherwise the main
library R_HOME/library
is used. (R_LIBS
is looked
for in the environment: .Renviron
is not read by R CMD
.)
The Windows equivalent is1
Rcmd INSTALL -l /path/to/library pkg1 pkg2 ...
Alternatively, packages can be downloaded and installed from within
R. First set the option CRAN
to your nearest CRAN
mirror, for example
> options(CRAN = "http://cran.us.r-project.org/")
Then download and install package foo by
> install.packages("foo")
Unless the library is specified (argument lib
) the first library
in the library search path is used.
What this does is different on Unix and Windows. On Unix it consults
the list of available source packages on CRAN, downloads the
latest version of the foo sources, and installs it (via R
CMD INSTALL
). On Windows it looks at the list of binary
versions of packages and downloads the latest version (if any).
On Windows install.packages
can also install a binary package
from a local zip
file by setting argument CRAN
to
NULL
. RGui.exe
has a menu Packages
with a GUI
interface to install.packages
, update.packages
and
library
.
The command update.packages()
is the simplest way to ensure that
all the packages on your system are up to date. Set the CRAN
option as in the previous section. The update.packages()
downloads the list of available packages and their current versions,
compares it with those installed and offers to fetch and install any
that have later versions on CRAN.
An alternative way of keeping packages up-to-date is provided by the
command packageStatus()
, which returns an object with information
on all installed packages and packages available at multiple
repositories (CRAN, local archive, ...). The print
and
summary
methods give an overview of installed and available
packages, the upgrade
method offers to fetch and install outdated
packages. This allows R to fetch packages from several repositories and
keep in sync with all of them, instead of only one CRAN mirror, and is
intended to become the default package manager for future versions of R.
Packages can be removed in a number of ways. From a command prompt they can be removed by
R CMD REMOVE -l /path/to/library pkg1 pkg2 ...
(Unix) or
Rcmd REMOVE -l /path/to/library pkg1 pkg2 ...
(Windows).
From a running R process they can be removed by
> remove.packages(c("pkg1", "pkg2"), lib = file.path("path", "to", "library"))
Finally, in most installations one can just remove the package directory from the library.
Note: whereas it is currently possible to install package bundles, one cannot remove these as such--the packages contained in the bundle have to removed individually.
This appendix gives details of programs you will need to build R on
Unix-like platforms, or which will be used by R if found by
configure
.
You need a means of compiling C and FORTRAN 77 (see Using FORTRAN). Some add-on packages also need a C++ compiler.
You will need Perl version 5.004 or later, available via
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/, to build any of the on-line
documentation. (The Rdindex
utility requires version 5.005 or
later, but has been deprecated in favor of the function Rdindex()
in package tools as of R version 1.7.0.)
You will not be able to build the info files unless you have
makeinfo
version 4 or later installed.
The typeset documentation needs tex
and latex
, or
pdftex
and pdflatex
.
The command-line editing depends on the readline
library
available from any GNU mirror: you will need a fairly recent version.
The bitmapped graphics devices jpeg()
and png()
need the
appropriate headers and libraries installed: jpeg
(version 6b
or later) or libpng
(version 1.2.3 or later) and zlib
(version 1.1.3 or later) respectively.
The bitmap
and dev2bitmap
devices make use of ghostscript
(http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost).
If you have them installed (including the approrpiate headers),
zlib
, libbz2
and PCRE will be used: otherwise versions
in the R sources will be compiled in.
The tcltk package needs Tcl/Tk installed: the sources are available at http://www.scriptics.com/. To specify the locations of the Tcl/Tk files you may need the configuration options
--with-tcltk
--with-tcl-config=TCL_CONFIG
tclConfig.sh
--with-tk-config=TK_CONFIG
tkConfig.sh
or use the configure variables TCLTK_LIBS
and
TCLTK_CPPFLAGS
to specify the flags needed for linking against
the Tcl and Tk libraries and for finding the tcl.h
and
tk.h
headers, respectively.
Versions of Tcl/TK from 8.0 to 8.4.1 have been used successfully.
The linear algebra routines in R can make use of enhanced BLAS (Basic
Linear Algebra Subprograms, http://www.netlib.org/blas/faq.html)
routines. Some are compiler-system-specific (libsunperf
on Sun
Sparc2, libessl
on IBM, vecLib
on MacOS
X) but ATLAS (http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/) is a "tuned"
BLAS that runs on a wide range of Unix-alike platforms. If no more
specific library is found, a libblas
library in the library path
will be used. You can specify a specific BLAS library by the
configuration option --with-blas
and not to use an external
BLAS library by --without-blas
.
For systems with multiple processors it is in principle possible to use
a multi-threaded version of ATLAS. This is currently not supported.
The problem is that SIGINT
signals will not be handled properly
when sent during a multi-threaded ATLAS computation, and this may result
in a segmentation fault. Changes in the R internals are needed to
support the use of threaded libraries; this will hopefully be addressed
in a future release. If despite this warning you still want to use a
multi-threaded ATLAS you can do so by specifying
--with-blas="-lptf77blas -lpthread -latlas"
Note that the BLAS library will be used for several add-on packages as well as for R itself. This means that it is better to use a shared BLAS library, as most of a static library will be compiled into the R executable and each BLAS-using package. In any case, the BLAS library must be usable with dynamically-loadable code.
You will need double-precision and double-complex versions of the BLAS, but not single-precision nor complex routines.
As from R 1.7.0, provision is made for using an external LAPACK
library, principally to cope with BLAS libraries which contain a copy of
LAPACK (such as libsunperf
on Solaris and vecLib
on MacOS
10.2.2). However, the likely performance gains are thought to be small
(and may be negative), and the default is not to search for a suitable
LAPACK library. You can specify a specific LAPACK library or a search
for a generic library by the configuration option
--with-lapack
. The default for --with-lapack
is to
check the BLAS library and then look for an external library
-llapack
. Sites searching for the fastest possible linear
algebra may want to build a LAPACK library using the ATLAS-optimized
subset of LAPACK. To do so specify something like
--with-lapack="-L/path/to/libs -llapack -lcblas"
since the ATLAS subset of LAPACK depends on libcblas
.
If you do use --with-lapack
, be aware of potential problems
with bugs in the LAPACK 3.0 sources (or in the posted corrections to those
sources). In particular, bugs in DGEEV
and DGESDD
have
resulted in error messages such as
DGEBRD gave error code -10
(from the Debian -llapack
which was current in late 2002). Other
potential problems are incomplete versions of the libraries: for example
libsunperf
from Sun Forte 6.x was missing the entry point for
DLANGE
and vecLib
has omitted the BLAS routine
LSAME
.
As with all libraries, you need to ensure that they and R were
compiled with compatible compilers and flags. For example, this means
that on Sun Sparc using the native compilers the flag -dalign
is needed so libsunperf
can be used.
An ATLAS `tuned' BLAS can also be used on Windows: see
src/gnuwin32/INSTALL
for how to enable this when building from
source, and R Windows FAQ for adding pre-compiled support to binary versions.
Note that under Unix (but not under Windows) if R is compiled against a non-default BLAS, then all BLAS-using packages must also be. So if R is re-built after ATLAS is installed, then packages such as quantreg will need to be re-installed.
configure
has many options: running
./configure --help
will give a list. Probably the most important ones not covered elsewhere are (defaults in brackets)
--with-x
--x-includes=DIR
--x-libraries=DIR
--with-readline
--enable-R-profiling
Rprof()
[yes]
--enable-R-shlib
You can use --without-foo
or --disable-foo
for the
negatives.
You will want to use --disable-R-profiling
if you are building
a profiled executable of R (e.g. with -pg)
.
Flag --enable-R-shlib
causes the make process to build R as a
shared library, typically called libR.so
, and to take
considerably longer, so you probably only want this if you will be using
an application which embeds R.
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
(which documents all the variables you might want to
set) or on the command line as
./configure VAR=value
These variables are precious, implying that they do not have to be exported to the environment, are kept in the cache even if not specified on the command line and checked for consistency between two configure runs (provided that caching is used), and are kept during automatic reconfiguration as if having been passed as command line arguments, even if no cache is used.
See the variable output section of configure --help
for a list of
all these variables.
One common variable to change is R_PAPERSIZE
, which defaults to
a4
, not letter
. (Valid values are a4
,
letter
, legal
and executive
.)
If you have libraries and header files, e.g., for GNU readline, in
non-system directories, use the variables LDFLAGS
(for libraries,
using -L
flags to be passed to the linker) and CPPFLAGS
(for header files, using -I
flags to be passed to the C/C++
preprocessors), respectively, to specify these locations. These default
to /usr/local/lib
and /usr/local/include
to catch the most
common cases. If libraries are still not found, then maybe your
compiler/linker does not support re-ordering of -L
and
-l
flags (this has been reported to be a problem on HP-UX with
the native cc
). In this case, use a different compiler (or a
front end shell script which does the re-ordering).
Another precious variable is R_BROWSER
, the default browser, which
should take a value of an executable in the user's path or specify
a full path.
If you find you need to alter configure variables, it is worth noting
that some settings may be cached in the file config.cache
, and it
is a good idea to remove that file (if it exists) before re-configuring.
Note that caching is turned off by default; use the command line
option --config-cache
(or -C
) to enable caching.
To compile R, you will most likely find it easiest to use GNU
make
. On Solaris 2.6/7/8 in particular, you need a version of
GNU make
different from 3.77; 3.79.1 works fine, as does the Sun
make
. The native make
is reported to fail on SGI
Irix 6.5 and Alpha/OSF1 (aka Tru64).
To build in a separate directory you need a make
that uses the
VPATH
variable, for example GNU make
, or Sun
make
on Solaris 2.7/8 (but not earlier).
If you want to use a make
by another name, for example if your
GNU make
is called gmake
, you need to set the variable
MAKE
at configure time, for example
./configure MAKE=gmake
To compile R, you need a FORTRAN compiler or f2c
, the
FORTRAN-to-C converter (http://www.netlib.org/f2c). The default
is to search for g77
, f77
, xlf
,
frt
, pgf77
, fl32
, af77
,
fort77
, f90
, xlf90
, pgf90
,
epcf90
, f95
, fort
, xlf95
,
lf95
, g95
, and fc
(in that
order)3, 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 configure variables F77
and F2C
which specify
the commands that run the FORTRAN 77 compiler and FORTRAN-to-C
converter, respectively. If F77
is given, it is used to compile
FORTRAN; otherwise, if F2C
is given, f2c is used even if a
FORTRAN compiler would be be available. If your FORTRAN compiler is in
a non-standard location, you should set the environment variable
PATH
accordingly before running configure
, or use the
configure variable F77
to specify its full path.
If your FORTRAN libraries are in slightly peculiar places, you should
also look at LD_LIBRARY_PATH
or your system's equivalent to make
sure that all libraries are on this path.
You must set whatever compilation flags (if any) are needed to ensure
that FORTRAN integer
is equivalent to a C int
pointer and
FORTRAN double precision
is equivalent to a C double
pointer. This is checked during the configuration process.
Some of the FORTRAN code makes use of COMPLEX*16
variables, which
is a FORTRAN 90 extension. This is checked for at configure
time4, but you may need to avoid
compiler flags5 asserting
FORTRAN 77 compliance.
For performance reasons6 you may want to choose a FORTRAN 90/95 compiler.
If you use f2c
you may need to ensure that the FORTRAN type
integer
is translated to the C type int
. Normally
f2c.h
contains typedef long int integer;
, which will work
on a 32-bit platform but not on a 64-bit platform.
A wide range of flags can be set in the file config.site
or as
configure variables on the command line. We have already mentioned
CPPFLAGS
-I
) and any other miscellaneous
options for the C and C++ preprocessors and compilers
LDFLAGS
-L
), stripping (-s
) and any other miscellaneous
options for the linker
and others include
CFLAGS
MAIN_CFLAGS
SHLIB_CFLAGS
FFLAGS
MAIN_FFLAGS
SHLIB_FFLAGS
MAIN_LDFLAGS
SHLIB_LDFLAGS
Library paths specified as -L/lib/path
in LDFLAGS
are
collected together and prepended to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
(or your
system's equivalent), so there should be no need for -R
or
-rpath
flags.
To compile a profiling version of R, one might for example want to
use MAIN_CFLAGS=-pg
, MAIN_FFLAGS=-pg
,
MAIN_LDFLAGS=-pg
on platforms where -pg
cannot be used
with position-independent code.
Beware: it may be necessary to set CFLAGS
and
FFLAGS
in ways compatible with the libraries to be used: one
possible issue is the alignment of doubles, another is the way
structures are passed.
This interface is experimental and incomplete. It provides a console
and two graphics devices named gtk()
and gnome()
. The
console offers a basic command line editing and history mechanism, along
with tool and button bars that give a point-and-click interface to some
R commands. Many of the features of the console are currently
stubs. The gtk()
graphics device is a port of the x11()
device to GDK (the GIMP Drawing Kit). The gnome()
device uses the GNOME canvas.
Due to its experimental nature, the GNOME interface for R
will not be built automatically. You must specify it by running
configure with the --with-gnome
option. For example, you might
run
./configure --with-gnome
but please check you have all the requirements first. You need at least the following libraries (or later) installed
audiofile-0.2.1 esound-0.2.23 glib-1.2.10 gtk+-1.2.10 imlib-1.9.10 ORBit-0.5.12 gnome-libs-1.4.1.2 libxml-1.8.16 libglade-0.17
It is preferable to have a complete installation of the GNOME desktop environment. If you use Linux, then this should be provided with your distribution. In addition, packaged binary distributions of GNOME are available from http://www.ximian.com for the most popular Linux distributions and for Solaris.
Remember that some package management systems (such as RPM and
deb) make a distinction between the user version of a package and the
developer version. The latter usually has the same name but with the
extension -devel
. If you use a pre-packaged version of
GNOME then you must have the developer versions of the above
packages in order to compile the R-GNOME interface.
The full list of GNOME options to configure is
--with-gnome
--with-gnome-includes=DIR
--with-gnome-libs=DIR
--with-libglade-config=LIBGLADE_CONFIG
libglade-config
This section provides some notes on building R on different Unix-like platforms. These notes are based on tests run on one or two systems in each case with particular sets of compilers and support libraries. Success in building R depends on the proper installation and functioning of support software; your results may differ if you have other versions of compilers and support libraries.
You can build R as a Unix application on MacOS X. You will need the
DevTools, f2c
or g77
, and the dlcompat
library. You will also need to install an X sub-system or configure
with --without-x
.
f2c
, g77
, the dlcompat
library, and X server
and support libraries are available from the Fink project
(http://fink.sourceforge.net). At the time of writing
f2c
and g77
were not available as part of the Fink
binary distribution and needed to be installed directly; for example for
g77
use
fink install g77
The vecLib
library of MacOS >= 10.2.2 can be used via the
configuration options
--with-blas="-framework vecLib" --with-lapack
to provide higher-performance versions of the BLAS and LAPACK routines.
With gcc 3.1
that appears to be the only way to build R, as
the Fortran support routines in libg2c
cannot be linked into a
dynmaic library. (We have had reports of success with pre-release
versions of gcc 3.3
.)
R has been built successfully on Solaris 8 aka Solaris 2.8 aka SunOS
5.8 using gcc
/g77
and the SunPro WorkShop 6 (aka
Forte 6) compilers and the `Sun ONE Studio 7 Compiler Suite' (aka Forte
7), and less regularly on Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, 2.7 and 9. GNU
make
is needed prior to Solaris 2.7 for building other than in
the source tree, and perhaps even then.
The Solaris versions of several of the tools needed to build R
(e.g. make
, ar
and ld
) are in
/usr/ccs/bin
, so if using those tools ensure this is in your
path.
gcc
3.2.1 and 3.2.2 generate incorrect code on 32-bit Solaris
builds with optimization, but versions 3.1, 3.2, 3.2.3 and 3.3 work
correctly. At least files src/main/engine.c
,
src/main/graphics.c
and src/modules/devX11.c
are affected.
If using gcc
, do ensure that the compiler was compiled for the
version of Solaris in use. (This can be ascertained from gcc
-v
.) gcc
makes modified versions of some header files, and
so (for example) gcc
compiled under Solaris 2.6 will not
compile R under Solaris 2.7. Also, do ensure that it was compiled
for the assembler/loader in use. If you download gcc
from
http://www.sunfreeware.com then you need to download
binutils
too. To avoid all these pitfalls we strongly
recommended you compile gcc
from the sources yourself.
When using the SunPro compilers do not specify -fast
, as
this disables IEEE arithmetic and make check
will
fail. The maximal set of optimization options known to work is
-xlibmil -xO5 -dalign
We have found little performance difference between gcc
and
cc
but considerable benefit from using a SunPro Fortran
compiler: the gcc
/f77
combination works well. For
many C++ applications (e.g. package Matrix) Forte 7 requires
-lCstd
, which the configure script will add to
SHLIB_CXXLDFLAGS
if it identifies the compiler correctly.
To compile for a 64-bit target on Solaris (which needs an UltraSparc chip and for support to be enabled in the OS) with the Forte 6 and 7 compilers we used
CC="cc -xarch=v9" CFLAGS="-xO5 -xlibmil -dalign" F77="f95 -xarch=v9" FFLAGS="-xO5 -xlibmil -dalign" CXX="CC -xarch=v9" CXXFLAGS="-xO5 -xlibmil -dalign"
in config.site
.
For 64-bit compilation with gcc
3.2.x we used
CC="gcc -m64" FFLAGS="-m64 -g -O2" CXXFLAGS="-m64 -g -O2" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib/sparcv9 -L/usr/local/lib"
Note that using f95
allows the Sun
performance library libsunperf
to be selected: it will not work
with f77
, nor with g77
. libsunperf
contains both BLAS and LAPACK code, and --with-lapack
is
recommended for 32-bit builds using f95
, but not for
64-bit builds where on our test system it failed in both Forte 6U1 and
7, albeit in different ways. Our experience has been that ATLAS's BLAS
is faster than libsunperf
, especially for complex numbers.
Some care is needed to ensure that libraries found by
configure
are compatible with the R executable and modules, as
the testing process will not detect many of the possible problems. For
32-bit builds under cc
the flag -dalign
is needed for
some of the Sun libraries: fortunately the equivalent flag for
gcc
, -mno-unaligned-doubles
, is the default. In theory,
libraries such as libpng
, libjpeg
, zlib
and the
ATLAS libraries need to be built with a pic
or PIC
flag,
which could be a problem if static libraries are used. In practice this
seems to give little problem for 32-bit builds.
For a 64-bit build, 64-bit libraries must be used. As the configuration
process by default sets LDFLAGS
to -L/usr/local/lib
,
you may need to set it to avoid finding 32-bit addons (as in the
gcc -m64
example above).
R has been built successfully on HP-UX 10.2 and HP-UX 11.0 using both
native compilers and gcc
. However, 10.2 has not been tested
since R 1.4.0. By default, R is configured to use gcc
and
g77
on HP-UX (if available). Some installations of
g77
only install a static version of the g2c
library
that cannot be linked into a shared library since its files have not
been compiled with the appropriate flag for producing position
independent code (PIC). This will result in make
failing with a linker error similar to
ld: CODE_ONE_SYM fixup to non-code subspace in file foo.o - shared library must be position independent. Use +z or +Z to recompile.
(+z
and +Z
are the PIC flags for the native
compiler cc
.) If this is the case you either need to modify
your g77
installation or configure with
F77=fort77
to specify use of the native POSIX-compliant FORTRAN 77 compiler.
You may find that configure
detects other libraries that R
needs to use as shared libraries but are only available as static
libraries. If you cannot install shared versions you will need to tell
configure
not to use these libraries, or make sure they are
not in the library path. The symptom will the linker error shown in the
last paragraph. Static libraries that might be found and would cause
problems are
BLAS use --without-blas Tcl/Tk use --without-tcltk GNOME not built by default libpng use --without-libpng jpeg use --without-jpeglib zlib use --without-zlib
and bzip2
and pcre
are problematic when building
libR.so
, only. These can be avoided by --without-bzlib
and --without-pcre
respectively.
Some versions of gcc
may contain what appears to be a bug at
the -O2
optimization level that causes
> 2 %/% 2 [1] 1 > 1:2 %/% 2 [1] 0 0 # wrong!!
which will cause make check
to fail. If this is the case, you
should use CFLAGS
to specify -O
as the optimization
level to use.
Some systems running HP-UX 11.0 may have a gcc
that was
installed under HP-UX 10.2. Between versions 10.2 and 11.0 HP-UX
changed its support functions for IEEE arithmetic from the
recommended functions of the IEEE standard to the ones
specified in the C9x draft standard. In particular, this means that
finite
has been replaced by isfinite
. A gcc
configured for HP-UX 10.2 run on 11.0 will not find isfinite
, and
as a result configure
does not recognize the machine as fully
supporting IEEE arithmetic and does not define IEEE_754
when compiling C code. This results in a failure in make
check
. The best solution is to install a properly configured
gcc
. An alternative work-around is to add -DIEEE_754
to the CFLAGS
variable.
You can configure R to use both the native cc
and
fort77
with
./configure CC=cc F77=fort77
f90
insists on linking against a static libF90.a
which
typically resides in a non-standard directory (e.g.,
/opt/fortran90/lib
). Hence, to use f90
one needs to
add this directory to the linker path via the configure variable
LDFLAGS
(e.g., ./configure F77=f90
LDFLAGS=/opt/fortran90/lib
).
R has been built successfully on IRIX64 6.5 using
gcc
/f77
or cc
/f77
for 32-bit
executables and the native compilers for a 64-bit executable. The
command
./configure CC="cc -64" F77="f77 -64" --with-tcltk=no
was used to create the 64-bit executable. It was necessary to
explicitly omit Tcl/Tk because configure
would find the 32-bit
version but not detect that is was incompatible with a 64-bit build.
A 32-bit build using gcc
/g77
passed make
check
but failed make test-all-extras
in the complex LAPACK
tests.
R has been built successfully on an Alpha running OSF1 V4.0 using
gcc
/g77
and cc
/f77
. Mixing
cc
and g77
fails to configure. The
configure
option --without-blas
was used since the
native blas seems not to have been built with the flags needed to
suppress SIGFPE
's. Currently R does not set a signal handler for
SIGFPE
on platforms that support IEEE arithmetic, so
these are fatal.
Attempts to build R on an Alpha with FreeBSD 4.3 have been only
partly successful. Configuring with -mieee
added to both
CFLAGS
and FFLAGS
builds successfully, but tests fail with
SIGFPE
's. It would appear that -mieee
only defers these
rather than suppressing them entirely. Advice on how to complete this
port would be greatly appreciated.
On AIX 4.3.3 and AIX 5.1, it was found that the use of "run time
linking" (as opposed to normal AIX style linking) was required. For
this, the R main program must be linked to the runtime linker with the
-brtl
linker option, and shareable objects must be enabled for
runtime linking with the -G
linker option. Without these
options, the AIX linker will not automatically link to any shared object
with a .so
extension. Also, the R main program is unable to
dynamically load modules (such as X11) with the dlopen
call.
When setting MAIN_LDFLAGS
and SHLIB_LDFLAGS
accordingly,
note that linker flags must be escaped using -Wl,
if
gcc
is used for linking: use MAIN_LDFLAGS="-Wl,brtl"
and SHLIB_LDFLAGS="-Wl,-G"
in this case.
Harald Servat Gelabert <harald@cepba.upc.es> reported success building R 1.7.0 under AIX 5.1 with
CC=xlc F77=xlf CXX=xlC CFLAGS=-O3 -qstrict -qmaxmem=8192 FFLAGS=-O3 -qstrict -qmaxmem=8192 CXXFLAGS=-O2 -qmaxmem=8192 MAIN_LDFLAGS=-Wl,-brtl SHLIB_LDFLAGS=-Wl,-G
but was unable to use the X libraries or the native BLAS (ESSL) and so
used --without-x --without-blas
.
There are a number of sources of problems when installing R on a new hardware/OS platform. These include
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 behaviour; Sun/Sparc, SGI/IRIX and ix86
Linux require no special action, FreeBSD requires a call to (the macro)
fpsetmask(0)
and OSF1 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.
Beware of using high levels of optimization, at least initially. On
many compilers these reduce the degree of compliance to the
IEEE model. For example, using -fast
on the Solaris
SunPro compilers causes R's NaN
to be set incorrectly.
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. GNU libtool cannot be used (yet), as it currently does not
fully support FORTRAN (and will most likely never support f2c
:
one would need a shell wrapper for this). The technique we use is to
first interrogate the X window system about what it does (using
xmkmf
), and then override this in situations where we know
better (for tools from the GNU Compiler Collection and/or platforms we
know about). This typically works, but you may have to manually
override the results. Scanning the manual entries for cc
and
ld
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 have had a fair amount of practice at porting R to new platforms ....
configure
: Using make, Configuration variables, Installation, Simple compilation
install.packages
: Installing packages
make
: Using make
R_HOME
: Simple compilation
remove.packages
: Removing packages
rsync
: Using rsync
update.packages
: Updating packages
if you have the source-code package files installed
Using the SunPro aka Forte aka Sun ONE cc
and
f95
compilers
On HP-UX fort77
is the POSIX
compliant FORTRAN compiler, and comes second in the search list.
as well as its equivalence to the Rcomplex
structure defined in R_ext/Complex.h
.
In particular, avoid g77
's
-pedantic
, which gives confusing error messages.
e.g., to use an optimized BLAS on Sun/Sparc