[R-gui] Re: [R] Feedback about SciViews?
At 11:02 AM +0100 5/1/03, Luke Whitaker wrote:
On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, A.J. Rossini wrote:
"Liaw, Andy" <andy_liaw at merck.com> writes:
>> The GUI itself (i.e., how it operated, what menus were where, etc.) >> was fine, but it was completely useless for anyone sitting at a >> remote host, due to dreadful image quality and poor performance when >> displaying anywhere other than on the console of the machine on which >> SPlus was actually running.
> > AFAIK the problem is the X server: it gives you a black window if the X > display is 16-bit. If you can live with 8-bit display, the Java GUI will > work. It's that way on all Unix (X?) platform.
I thought Java on Linux would do 8 and 24, but not 16? (or something truly weird like that). But that doesn't address performance issues, which still can be pretty bad.
It seems the problem here is limited to running R remotely. Given the power of cheap consumer desktop machines these days, this seems to me less of an issue than it used to be. Expensive commercial software probably gets run remotely more than it needs to because of licensing issues, which obviously don't apply to R.
Not only licensing issues, but platform issues. SPlus doesn't run on the platform that most of us here in my department have on our desktops. That's not the case with R, thank goodness. But there are other factors, such as administration and maintenance. With each new version of R comes the job of installing it. Will that be 10 installations or one? Running remotely on a server it's just one, and that is a considerable time savings. -Don
If the GUI can be cleanly split from the compute engine of R, then it should be quite easy to get the GUI running locally even if the compute engine is remote - although I re-iterate my question for the need to run free software remotely. My very modest desktop machine is far more powerfull than the mainframe that I learnt to use SAS on, and not so far short of the very expensive file server that I use now. Luke
-------------------------------------- Don MacQueen Environmental Protection Department Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Livermore, CA, USA