Loon
I met Wayne Oldford of the University of Waterloo Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science on Monday, and he showed me his awesome loon package for interactive exploratory data visualization in R. This post explains how I got it to work on my computer. First I tried downloading/installing loon from CRAN, and I got the following error message:
> install.packages("loon")
trying URL 'http://probability.ca/cran/src/contrib/loon_1.1.0.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 875747 bytes (855 KB)
==================================================
downloaded 855 KB
* installing *source* package ‘loon’ ...
** package ‘loon’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** R
** data
*** moving datasets to lazyload DB
** demo
** inst
** preparing package for lazy loading
Warning: S3 methods ‘as.character.tclObj’, ‘as.character.tclVar’, ‘as.double.tclObj’, ‘as.integer.tclObj’, ‘as.logical.tclObj’, ‘as.raw.tclObj’, ‘print.tclObj’, ‘[[.tclArray’, ‘[[<-.tclArray’, ‘$.tclArray’, ‘$<-.tclArray’, ‘names.tclArray’, ‘names<-.tclArray’, ‘length.tclArray’, ‘length<-.tclArray’, ‘tclObj.tclVar’, ‘tclObj<-.tclVar’, ‘tclvalue.default’, ‘tclvalue.tclObj’, ‘tclvalue.tclVar’, ‘tclvalue<-.default’, ‘tclvalue<-.tclVar’, ‘close.tkProgressBar’ were declared in NAMESPACE but not found
Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘tcltk’:
.onLoad failed in loadNamespace() for 'tcltk', details:
call: fun(libname, pkgname)
error: Tcl/Tk support is not available on this system
Error : package ‘tcltk’ could not be loaded
ERROR: lazy loading failed for package ‘loon’
* removing ‘/home/tdhock/lib/R/library/loon’
The downloaded source packages are in
‘/tmp/RtmpyMCpX2/downloaded_packages’
Updating HTML index of packages in '.Library'
Making 'packages.html' ... done
Warning message:
In install.packages("loon") :
installation of package ‘loon’ had non-zero exit status
>
Actually the problem is that the tcltk package can not be loaded:
> library(tcltk)
Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘tcltk’:
.onLoad failed in loadNamespace() for 'tcltk', details:
call: fun(libname, pkgname)
error: Tcl/Tk support is not available on this system
In addition: Warning message:
S3 methods ‘as.character.tclObj’, ‘as.character.tclVar’, ‘as.double.tclObj’, ‘as.integer.tclObj’, ‘as.logical.tclObj’, ‘as.raw.tclObj’, ‘print.tclObj’, ‘[[.tclArray’, ‘[[<-.tclArray’, ‘$.tclArray’, ‘$<-.tclArray’, ‘names.tclArray’, ‘names<-.tclArray’, ‘length.tclArray’, ‘length<-.tclArray’, ‘tclObj.tclVar’, ‘tclObj<-.tclVar’, ‘tclvalue.default’, ‘tclvalue.tclObj’, ‘tclvalue.tclVar’, ‘tclvalue<-.default’, ‘tclvalue<-.tclVar’, ‘close.tkProgressBar’ were declared in NAMESPACE but not found
>
That “Tcl/Tk support is not available on this system” made me think that I need to recompile R with tcltk support. So I downloaded R-3.4.2 source code and I when I ran the configure script I saw the following:
tdhock@recycled:~/R/R-3.4.2$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME
...
checking for tclConfig.sh... no
checking for tclConfig.sh in library (sub)directories... no
checking for tkConfig.sh... no
checking for tkConfig.sh in library (sub)directories... no
checking for tcl.h... no
...
Interfaces supported: X11
...
I guessed that I needed to install tcltk dev libraries, which is done via the following on my Ubuntu system:
sudo aptitude install tcl-dev tk-dev
After that I got the following output from the configure script:
tdhock@recycled:~/R/R-3.4.2$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-blas --with-lapack --enable-R-shlib
...
checking for tclConfig.sh... no
checking for tclConfig.sh in library (sub)directories... /usr/lib/tclConfig.sh
checking for tkConfig.sh... no
checking for tkConfig.sh in library (sub)directories... /usr/lib/tkConfig.sh
checking tcl.h usability... yes
checking tcl.h presence... yes
checking for tcl.h... yes
checking tk.h usability... yes
checking tk.h presence... yes
checking for tk.h... yes
checking whether compiling/linking Tcl/Tk code works... yes
...
Interfaces supported: X11, tcltk
...
Then I did make and make install and then,
> install.packages("loon")
trying URL 'http://probability.ca/cran/src/contrib/loon_1.1.0.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 875747 bytes (855 KB)
==================================================
downloaded 855 KB
* installing *source* package ‘loon’ ...
** package ‘loon’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** R
** data
*** moving datasets to lazyload DB
** demo
** inst
** preparing package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
*** copying figures
** building package indices
** installing vignettes
** testing if installed package can be loaded
* DONE (loon)
The downloaded source packages are in
‘/tmp/Rtmpkkcn4y/downloaded_packages’
Updating HTML index of packages in '.Library'
Making 'packages.html' ... done
>
Finally it works!
library(loon)
demo("loon", package="loon")