Installing rgl on Ubuntu and Mac: X11 not found
On Ubuntu, what worked for me was to install the package directly from the command line:
sudo apt-get install r-cran-rgl
(We have a strange setup here, so YMMV)
On Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, you might get this issue when trying to install rgl
from CRAN:
checking for X... no configure: error: X11 not found but required, configure aborted.
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘rgl’
Credit is due to this blog which solved my problems at installing rgl
:
http://solaimurugan.blogspot.ca/2015/09/3d-data-visualization-using-r-configure.html
In case the link above disappears, the solution, as outlined in the blog is:
sudo apt-get install xorg
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev
sudo apt-get install libglu1-mesa-dev
More recently, installing rgl on a fresh ubuntu 16.04 install also requires a further step (as noted in the comments below), if you get this error:
fatal error: ft2build.h: No such file or directory
This is solved with:
sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev
Then installing rgl
from CRAN should just work.
On CentOS, what finally did the trick was installing libpng-dev:
sudo yum install libpng-devel.x86_64
Prior to this, I installed xorg, libx11, the mesa GL library, and freeglut.
sudo yum install xorg-x11-server-Xvfb.x86_64 xorg-x11-server-devel.x86_64
sudo yum install libX11.x86_64 libX11-devel.x86_64
sudo yum install mesa-libGL mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libGLU mesa-libGLU-devel
sudo yum install freeglut.x86_64 freeglut-devel.x86_64
The way I finally figured out what was missing was to try compiling from source (download the tar.gz at cran), and examining the config.log after ./configure failed.