OS 10.5.8 Compatibility

Hi Simon,

I am not sure if you saw the email that I responded to that David
sent.  In that response I used the link he sent me.  In that response
I used the versions listed on the link.

And described exactly what I did that resulted in it freezing up.

I hope this is clear.  If it is not, I am happy to provide whatever
additional information would be useful.  I think the r-team does
amazing work and I would be happy to help in whatever way I can.

In case you missed that email, I have copied it below.

The referenced R installs are from
http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN/bin/macosx/universal/base/ and the two
are R-2.10.0.dmg and R-2.9.2.dmg

Cheers!
Francis

Hi David,

I know I was being vague when I posted but I had gotten frustrated
with R and deleted it hours before and I was not sure what the version
was at the time.  But now I am.

Version R-2.10.0 worked on startup and worked when I typed >1:10
however it froze when I typed >f() without f being defined.  There
were other functions that caused it to freeze, but I did not keep
track of all of them.

So I tried R-2.10.0 and it froze again under identical circumstances.

I went to the next oldest version R-2.9.2 and it froze on the last
stage of the installation process.  I forced it to quit and went to
the application folder and so far it is stable.

If it has problems, I will just keep going back to older releases.

Thank you for your help,
Francis

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 7:00 PM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:

Francis,

On Dec 5, 2009, at 3:05 PM, Francis Smart wrote:

Dear R people,

I am running OS 10.5.8 on my PowerBook G4 and unfortunately it will
not allow me to upgrade to Snow Leopard, because it does not run an
Intel Chip.

FWIW that makes no difference as we don't build anything specially for Snow Leopard. And, yes, ppc is no longer supported by Apple since 10.6.

I have downloaded a version of R and it does not appear to be stable.

Can you tell us which version, please? I know that you already answered that you're happy with 2.9.2 but unless you tell us there may be more users sharing your frustration ... I don't have any ppc machines anymore so I cannot easily test that ...

I have thought about about installing Linux to ensure a stable build
but unfortunately I bought the PowerBook G4 used and I did not come
with install disks.  The Leopard install disks I do have refuse to run
on an non-Intel machine.  So if I installed Linux, that would mean
that I would have to uninstall OS X and I probably would not be able
to reinstall it.

So I guess I am wondering if anybody has a build of R that they know
is stable on 10.5.8.  Also, I am sure there are other potential
solutions that I have not thought of.

R is supposed to be stable but there was one big change in the R.app GUI for R 2.10 which may be the culprit (but then there were some GUI mismatch reports in the Tiger build so possibly the Leopard build is fine...). The real question is whether you installed the Tiger or the Leopard build of R (both work on your machine). Once we know we can try to trace that back ...

Cheers,
Simon

Any recommendations?

Thank you for your time,
Francis
--
Francis Smart
(202) 540-8108 primary

-- 
Francis Smart
--------------------
PhD Student - Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics - Michigan
State University
(406) 223-8108