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64 bit Mac GUI

4 messages · Smith, Edward C, Brian Ripley, Simon Urbanek

#
Simon, I'm following up a post that you responded to online.   
Apologies for the unsolicited email, but I thought you might be able  
to answer a quick question.  I'm running Mac OSX (Leopard) with 4GB  
RAM.  Nevertheless, I was getting the Error: Cannot allocate vector  
of....etc. message running some data and routines on the 32-bit R that  
I installed from CRAN.  I then installed the 64-bit and was able to  
run what I needed without a memory error, BUT, the problem I have now  
is that I can't seem to get a few necessary packages to work in the  
new version.  Specifically, I use routines from the "statnet" and  
"igraph" packages quite a bit.

I see two options.  First, I'd like to have both the 32 and 64 bit  
versions installed on my machine so that I can switch back and forth.   
It seems as soon as I get one installed, the other stops working, and  
vice versa.  The other, better, option is figuring out a way to get  
the packages to work in the 64-bit version.  Is this possible?  I use  
the GUI for both 32 bit and 64 bit (installed the latter per your  
instructions).  Now I seem to be lost completely.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Ned Smith
University of Chicago Booth School of Business
#
You should be able to install all the packages you need on a 64-but 
machine -- the Linux community has been doing so for years, and 64-bit 
Linux has been part of the testing equally for several years.  (I only 
have 64-bit Linux systems.)

With 'statnet', the chain of dependencies includes 'rgl' where you 
only have access to the X11 version (and will need to modify the 
sources to build it).  I suspect that this is actually a problem with 
the statnet suite - 'shapes' claims to depend on rgl but probably 
should only suggest it.  This is the not the place, but the authors of 
the suite need to be asked to study and follow 'Writing R Extensions'.

We know about the rgl issues, and workarounds are being discussed.

'igraph' compiles from the sources on x86_64 Mac OS -- what problems 
did you encounter when you tried?

Running 32- and 64-bit R on the same machine is very simple (start up 
with R --arch=), but I suspect what you are talking about is running 
R.app (the GUI).  I'll leave Simon to explain that.
On Sun, 1 Feb 2009, Smith, Edward C wrote:

            

  
    
#
On Feb 1, 2009, at 23:31 , Smith, Edward C wrote:

            
Thanks to Brian for answering the above.
I think you're mixing up the terms and confusing yourself. Please read  
R for Mac FAQ  (at least FAQ 12.13). There are two binaries - one is  
the Tiger binary with two architectures (32-bit PowerPC [ppc] and 32- 
bit Intel [i386]), the other is the Leopard binary with four  
architectures (32-bit PowerPC [ppc], 32-bit Intel [i386], 64-bit  
PowerPC [ppc64] and 64-bit Intel [x86_64]). You can never have both  
builds on one machine, because they install in exactly the same place  
-- however having both makes no real sense because the Leopard binary  
is functionally a superset of the Tiger binary.

Whether a given package works in 64-bit is up to the package and  
dependencies in your system. Although we provide package binaries for  
the Leopard build, it is not as complete, because currently we require  
that a package also compiles in 64-bit for it to be included and there  
are occasionally unmet dependencies. As a fallback you can usually use  
a Tiger R package in the Leopard build, but it is not something we  
guarantee and will give you 32-bit only.

One important note: if you have installed one build over the other,  
unexpected things can happen since this is not meant to work. It is  
highly advisable to start from scratch before switching between Tiger  
and Leopard build, e.g.
rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/R.framework
Note that GUIs are specific to both the build and 32/64-bit --- as you  
can see on the nightly page there are three different GUIs: tiger- 
Deployment (32-bit Tiger build), leopard-Leopard (32-bit Leopard  
build) and leopard-Leopard64 (64-bit Leopard build). You have to use  
the GUI(s) that matches your installation. If you installed R from the  
Installer packages (CRAN or R-2.8-branch-leopard.pkg), you will have  
the correct GUIs in Applications.

I hope his helps,
Simon
#
Thanks for the note, Brian.  This is very helpful.  As it turned out,  
I only needed to compile the packages locally using package source.   
This does not work for "statnet", but I was able to install all of its  
components (statnet is a kind of umbrella package).  So, it seems my  
original question about running both 32 and 64-bit is now irrelevant,  
gladly.  I still don't know why I was getting memory errors on the 32- 
bit architecture, but no need to fuss trying to figure it out now that  
things are running on the 64.  I was also able to get the 64-bit R.app  
GUI up and running...which is nice.

Thanks again for your help!

Ned
On Feb 2, 2009, at 2:33 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote: