Problem: Installing Rattle on Debian?

[Bill]

I've seen the posts about installing Rattle on OSX and W7; I have a similar problem on Debian Stable, and I haven't yet figured out how to fix it.

When I run R --no-restore and then do library(rattle); rattle(), I get a rather narrow Rattle window that's blank and stalled. 

The R console shows

R version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22)
Copyright (C) 2011 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.

  Natural language support but running in an English locale

R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.

Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.

> library(rattle)
Rattle: A free graphical interface for data mining with R.
Version 2.6.16 Copyright (c) 2006-2011 Togaware Pty Ltd.
Type 'rattle()' to shake, rattle, and roll your data.
> rattle()

(R:967): Gtk-WARNING **: Unknown property: GtkMenuBar.ubuntu-local
Error: attempt to apply non-function
In addition: Warning message:
In method(obj, ...) : Unknown internal child: selection
Rattle timestamp (for the message above): 2012-02-10 20:37:45
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> rattleInfo()
Rattle: version 2.6.16 cran 2.6.16
R: version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22) (Revision 57956)

Sysname: Linux
Release: 2.6.32-5-amd64
Version: #1 SMP Mon Jan 9 20:49:59 UTC 2012
Nodename: mymachine
Machine: x86_64
Login: myname
User: myname
Effective_user: myname

Installed Dependencies
RGtk2: version 2.20.21
bitops: version 1.0-4.1
colorspace: version 1.1-1
fEcofin: version 290.76
fBasics: version 2110.79
foreign: version 0.8-48 upgrade available 0.8-49
gdata: version 2.8.2
gplots: version 2.10.1
gtools: version 2.6.2
Hmisc: version 3.9-1 upgrade available 3.9-2
Matrix: version 1.0-3
nnet: version 7.3-1
randomForest: version 4.6-6
RColorBrewer: version 1.0-5
reshape: version 0.8.4
rggobi: version 2.1.17
ROCR: version 1.0-4
RODBC: version 1.3-4
rpart: version 3.1-51
survival: version 2.36-12
timeDate: version 2131.00

That was 23 packages.

Upgrade the packages with either of the following commands:

  > install.packages(c("foreign", "Hmisc"))

  > install.packages(rattleInfo())

I exited R, ran the install.packages in R as root, and then restarted R as me but got the same result.

Any ideas?  Any reason it's complaining about GtkMenuBar.ubuntu-local on a Debian machine?

Thanks,

Bill

[Bill]

Incidentally, I installed Rattle on XP64, and it seems to work.  (The problems I'm having seem to be related to learning Rattle, not to Rattle's installation.)

Bill

[Chris B]

I have nearly the exact same problem on Crunchbang Statler (based on
Debian Squeeze aka Stable), including the 'ubuntu' reference. I'm not
sure what posts you've read, so I referenced the ones that helped me
below.

I was able to fix the problem by doing the following:

1. Uninstalling all R software.
2. Adding the CRAN deb URLs to /etc/apt/sources.list (see
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian/ for more info) so that I
could get the latest R.
3. Installing 'r-base-core' and 'r-base-dev' from the CRAN repos
4. Installing 'RGtk2' from within a root R shell (note that I had to
also install e.g. 'colorspace', 'Hmisc', etc from within a root R
shell, because I had only 'r-base-core' and 'r-base-dev' from the apt
repos. I was able to get it working with 'RGtk2' directly from CRAN,
and using the Debian CRAN repos for the rest, but I dislike mixing
package versions).
5. Doing a hack to run Rattle, as previous poster(s) have had to do
(see e.g. http://groups.google.com/group/rattle-users/browse_thread/thread/c35aeb6366418946):
> library(rattle)
> crv$rattleUI <- "rattle_macosx.ui"
> rattle()

I don't know why the hack works (it seems very odd to me). In a
response to the previous post I linked to, Graham said that he may
"have to somehow fix the .ui file globally".

The key pieces that fixed things for me were using the latest R and
RGtk2 AND setting the rattle_macosx.ui. The CRAN Debian repo version
of RGtk2 was a little behind and did not work.

~Chris

> Any ideas?  Any reason it's complaining about GtkMenuBar.*ubuntu*-local on

[Bill]

Chris, thanks.  I had done 1-4 to have an up-to-date R, but I had skipped step 5, because that sounded as if it was for OS X only.  I figured that might be the issue, but I figured it would involve setting it to something that had Linux or Debian or X11 in the name. 

Amazing.  That seems to work.

Thanks!

Bill

[Graham Williams]

Thanks for the feedback and confirmation re the rattle_macosx.ui fix. I'll have to explore this some more to try and understand what the underlying issue is. Hopefully I can fix this for an upcoming release.

Regards,
Graham