Golden Cheetah kept crashing (not even opening) on MacOS; finally figured out why: R

[Jan Van Mieghem]

GC on my Mac failed to open; even when I click “ignore” it always failed, even after I re-installed several times the latest build.

I really wanted it to work — yes, big THANK you to all GC developers! — so ended up last weekend (Nov 4, 2017) to completely do a clean MacOS install (wiped the solid state hard drive and all programs/data).
After successful MacOS install, and installing my Cloud Drives (Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, and Dropbox), the first application program I installed was GC’s latest build and then I figured it out: During install, it said: “Cannot find the R installation “ (or something like that—I didn’t save the message) so I proceeded as is (without any R integration) and everything’s working now.

MORAL: somehow, the MacOS install of GC seems to search and try to link up with R. I did have R and R-studio installed before I did clean MacOS install so I figure that there must have been some wrong install connection with R.


SUGGESTION: Do default install of GC without searching or trying to integrate with R. Leave that as an option for later.

[Will install R and R-studio later this week and check whether GC will still run.]

[wps...@gmail.com]

Hi, I found this thread along with a few similar ones when I tried to get GC on Mac to run with R.  I've never used R before but I installed the lastest stable ( 3.4.2 "Short Summer") and determined the home directory through the R Console as mentioned in another thread here:

>print(R.home())

[1] "/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources"

This was the path I had put into GC after enabling R and finding that it would crash with or without the path specification.

This is a Macbook Pro Mid 2012 Retina running High Sierra (10.13.1)

When I start GC with --no-r it works normally, and I can then uncheck the Use R box and resume normal operations.

TBH I don't even know what R graphing will give me - I had intended to install it - enable it and explore what was different out of curiosity.

So I'm not sure where this is at - if it is a versioning issue with R, Mac OS or GC configuration somehow not playing nice, but I thought it worth posting my experience in case it helps anyone else noticing this.

(FTR) For anyone who finds this post and is stuck trying to get GC to run again after experimenting with R and getting crashes, to start GC without R so you can uncheck the box in prefs you just start it from the terminal command line with --args --no-r:

cd to /Applications then

$ open ./GoldenCheetah.app --args --no-r

There is a "not a bug" thread here:

https://github.com/GoldenCheetah/GoldenCheetah/issues/1947

"1604 crash on OSX, 4 May 2016"

Cheers,

Will

[Ale Martinez]

El lunes, 13 de noviembre de 2017, 6:26:52 (UTC-3), wps...@gmail.com escribió:

Hi, I found this thread along with a few similar ones when I tried to get GC on Mac to run with R.  I've never used R before but I installed the lastest stable ( 3.4.2 "Short Summer") and determined the home directory through the R Console as mentioned in another thread here:

>print(R.home())

[1] "/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources"

This was the path I had put into GC after enabling R and finding that it would crash with or without the path specification.

This is a Macbook Pro Mid 2012 Retina running High Sierra (10.13.1)

When I start GC with --no-r it works normally, and I can then uncheck the Use R box and resume normal operations.

TBH I don't even know what R graphing will give me - I had intended to install it - enable it and explore what was different out of curiosity.

Even if you don't known anything about R t gives you access to nice and powerful charts available for download from the cloud!

 

So I'm not sure where this is at - if it is a versioning issue with R, Mac OS or GC configuration somehow not playing nice, but I thought it worth posting my experience in case it helps anyone else noticing this.

It is a known issue: R version 3.4 released this year is incompatible with GC v3.4, if you want to use R integration with GC v3.4, you need to install an older R version, v3.3.3 should be the latest version to work.

This is already fixed on the last GC v3.5 development build: https://github.com/GoldenCheetah/GoldenCheetah/releases

 

(FTR) For anyone who finds this post and is stuck trying to get GC to run again after experimenting with R and getting crashes, to start GC without R so you can uncheck the box in prefs you just start it from the terminal command line with --args --no-r:

cd to /Applications then

$ open ./GoldenCheetah.app --args --no-r

There is a "not a bug" thread here:

https://github.com/GoldenCheetah/GoldenCheetah/issues/1947

"1604 crash on OSX, 4 May 2016"

Just for reference this is not exclusive to OSX, something similar happens on Windows and Linux. 

[wps...@gmail.com]

Thank you Ale, that is most helpful.  I think I might try the dev version.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 01:10:19 UTC+11, Jan Van Mieghem wrote:

[wps...@gmail.com]

No luck - I saw another post noting that R is causing some problems since High Sierra and maybe I got the R install wrong but the way I tried to get it working was to install the development version and it crashes on startup until R is disabled, regardless of the directory chosen (or left blank).

[Ale Martinez]

Sorry, the problem was fixed in v3.5 source code but the current MAC build still uses R3.2.4 so it doesn't work with R3.4.2 yet, so you need R3.3.3 to use R embedding, see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golden-cheetah-users/CRf1E-pHaSU/D-cZtllVAgAJ

[wps...@gmail.com]

Thanks ALe, yes, the very next thing I did was install 3.3.3 and all is good!  Appreciate the detailed info :)