R 0.63.2 for Windows 9x and NT ============================== This distribution contains a binary distribution of R-0.63.2 to run on Windows 95, 98 and NT4 (at least) on Intel/clone chips. It is designed to be as close as possible to the implementation on Unix, but see the list of differences below. The port was by Guido Masarotto with many important contributions by Brian Ripley. Installation ============ Unpack rw0632b.zip anywhere you like. It will unpack to a directory tree under rw0632. The help and html help files are in separate files rw0632h.zip and rw0632w.zip which should be unpacked in the directory above rw0632. The source-change file rw0632s.zip is unpacked inside rw0632. Usage ===== There are two executables in rw0632\bin: GUI: Rgui.exe runs as a standard Windows GUI executable and provides an R console in its own window. It takes the standard R command-line arguments; these are most easily set by making a shortcut to ...\rw0632\bin\rgui.exe and adding the arguments in the Target field. Command-line editing is available: see Help | Console for details. The menus provide shortcuts to some R commands such as help, help.start, apropos, ls, load, save.image. Various aspects of the console (size, font, colours) can be customized by editing the file etc\Rconsole, and a copy with a user's settings can be put in her HOME directory. The file contains a description of the settings that can be altered. Observe that the help files use the latin1 encoding. To see all the characters you must use an appropriate font (True Type fonts should be ok). To check if your preferred font has latin1 capability, try "help(text)" and look to the example's lines. [Note: only a couple of files make use of latin1 characters not contained in the standard ASCII set, i.e., if you like a font without latin1 capability, use it.] TERMINAL/BATCH: Rterm.exe will run from a command line such as an MS-DOS or Commands Window running the standard shells, command.com (9x) and cmd.exe (NT) but not bash.exe from the Cygwin B20 distribution nor tcsh.exe. Its primary purpose is to allow batch operation, but it does provide all the facilities needed for interactive use, including simple command-line editing. Batch use: At it simplest, rterm.exe can be used in a batch mode by commands like Rterm.exe --vsize 6 --nsize 250000 --no-restore --no-save < infile > outfile although users will probably want to set up simple .bat or .cmd files to run batch jobs. Use with ESS-5.0: You can use Rterm.exe to provide inferior R-mode in ESS-5.0 mode under NTEmacs. The only change needed is to add the starting argument --ess to essd-r.el at the line (inferior-ess-start-args . "--ess")) GRAPHICS: The screen device is called x11, even though it runs under Windows. This is launched automatically, and can also be launched explicitly by windows() or x11(), from both Rgui.exe and Rterm.exe. The graphics device pops up an independent window which has two menus. The File menu allows saving to a GIF file or the clipboard or to run dev.off(). The History menu allows the recording of plots. When plots have been recorded they can be reviewed by PgUp and PgDn, saved and replaced. Recording can be turned on automatically (the Recording item on the list) or individual plots can be added (Add or the INS key). The whole plot history can be saved to or retrieved from an R variable in the global environment. There is only one graphics history shared by all the x11 devices. Adding packages =============== Binaries for many packages are available at CRAN/bin/windows/windows-NT/contrib. These are zip files which should be unpacked in rw0632\library. They are then available for use. The list of packages given by HTML help can be updated from a running R process by the command make.packages.html() provided the owner of the process has write permission on rw0632\doc\html. Both this and the alphabetical list of functions can be updated if you have the source-package files and PERL installed by cd ...\rw0632\src\gnuwin32\help make indices Private libraries of packages can be used and can be specified by the environment variable RLIBS. They will not however be linked to HTML help. To install a package from source code you need the source-package distribution rw0632sp.zip installed (but not R source). This contains detailed instructions. Differences from Unix ===================== - R can be interrupted by Esc in Rgui and by Ctrl-Break in Rterm: Ctrl-C is used for copying in the GUI version. - Command-line editing is always available, but is much simpler than under readline-based input on Unix. - The commands history is saved between sessions only by Rgui. - The html function and package lists are not re-generated automatically by html.start(). - There is no provision for printing help files, other than printing from an HTML browser. - Paths to files can be specified with "/" or "\\". - Using help.start() does not automatically send help requests to the browser(): use options(htmlhelp=T) to turn this on. - Graphics save and replay only here. BUILDING FROM SOURCE ==================== First collect the tools that you need. EITHER The cygwin-B20.x set of tools available from http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin and several mirrors, the Fortran additions ecgs-1.1-f77.tar.gz from that page or directly from http://www.xraylith.wisc.edu/~khan/software/gnu-win32/ and the Fortran library libg2c.mingw32.a.bz2 from CRAN/bin/windows/windows-NT/etc. Do remember to set MAKE_MODE to UNIX. OR The mingw32 port of egcs-1.1 from ftp://ftp.xraylith.wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/mingw32/egcs-1.1/, the ld.exe and cygwin1.dll from the B20 set in your path ahead of the mingw32 binaries (if you don't want to download all the B20 distribution, you can find the two files in CRAN/bin/windows/windows-NT/etc/ld.cygwin.zip). Suitable versions of rm, sed, mkdir, echo, cp and cat, for example (Win 9x) from the djtools set at CRAN/bin/windows/windows-NT/etc or (Win 9x or NT) a cygwin set. perl5, available via http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ports. groff, available at http://www.itribe.net/virtunix/groff-1.10nt.zip. All of these need to be installed and in your path, and the appropriate environment variables set. You also need: the R source (R-0.63.2.tar.gz) and rw0632s.zip. Then: untar R-0.63.1.tar,gz somewhere, unzip rw0632s.zip in /somewhere/R-0.63.1, cd /somewhere/R-0.63.2/src/gnuwin32 edit MkRules to set the appropriate paths as needed and run make BUILD=EGCS or CYGWIN Feedback ======== Please send comments and bug reports to Guido Masarotto and comments on the documentation and help system (but not its contents) to Brian Ripley