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Help! R won't start

7 messages · Marc Schwartz, Brian Ripley, Andrew Perrin

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Returning after the long weekend, I get the following:

aperrin at perrin:~/afshome/papers/microcultures/R$ R

R : Copyright 2003, The R Development Core Team
Version 1.7.0  (2003-04-16)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type `license()' or `licence()' for distribution details.

R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type `contributors()' for more information.

Type `demo()' for some demos, `help()' for on-line help, or
`help.start()' for a HTML browser interface to help.
Type `q()' to quit R.

Error in get(x, envir, mode, inherits) : variable "biplot" was not found
Fatal error: unable to restore saved data in .RData



Any advice? The partition is mounted read/write.  This is R 1.7.0 under
debian linux (kernel 2.4.20).

Thanks!

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu
#
try R --vanilla

The likely story is that you have library(MASS) in the .Rprofile being 
found.  That does not work in 1.7.0 (and is not the recommended way to do 
this: see the help archives for solutions, one of which is to run 
update.packages() and get the current VR bundle).
On Tue, 27 May 2003, Andrew Perrin wrote:

            

  
    
#
On Tue, 2003-05-27 at 08:49, Andrew Perrin wrote:
Andrew,

Do you by chance have library(MASS) in your .Rprofile?

If so, change it to:

options(defaultPackages=c(getOption("defaultPackages"), "MASS"))

Include any other packages that you are loading in the c(...) arguments
after MASS.

That will resolve the issue.

Regards,

Marc Schwartz
#
On Tue, 27 May 2003, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

            
Thanks for all the quick responses! However, I don't have library(MASS)
anywhere as far as I can tell - just the stock
/usr/lib/R/library/base/R/Rprofile which contains no such call.

Starting R from a different directory works fine. Furthermore, starting R
with --no-restore-data works fine, and I can then restore the data
manually using load(".RData").  That might provide a clue.

The data file is extremely large:

aperrin at perrin:~/afshome/papers/microcultures/R$ ls -l .RData
-rw-r--r--    1 aperrin  aperrin  104355299 May 27 10:20 .RData

which could be the problem too.

ap


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu
#
Oops - I forgot. I get this message when I try to quit and save the data:
Save workspace image? [y/n/c]: y
Warning messages:
1: namespaces may not be available when loading
2: names in persistent strings are currently ignored


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu
#
Looks like you have saved an object with a namespace (the MASS namespace) 
as its environment.  There is not much documentation available about
such situations, but see

http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/namespaces/morenames.html

for a sketch.

I suspect you got that message last time you saved, and then you were 
surprised when you had forgotten the warning.

Have you got a modified version of a MASS function in there?

In any case, the advice still applies: the current MASS will load up mva
which is what is needed, so update.packages().
On Tue, 27 May 2003, Andrew Perrin wrote:

            

  
    
#
Yes, that did it - thanks!

ap

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu
On Tue, 27 May 2003, Prof Brian Ripley wrote: