Problems with R and RGtk2

I ran across this issue while installing Rattle, a data mining library for the statistical programming language R, on to a Debian system. When installing the package RGtk2, seeing the below error means that your GTK version is not the version required by RGtk2.

 * installing *source* package ‘RGtk2’ ...  
 ** package ‘RGtk2’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked  
 checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config  
 checking pkg-config is at least version 0.9.0... yes  
 checking for INTROSPECTION... no  
 checking for GTK... no  
 configure: error: GTK version 2.8.0 required  
 ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘RGtk2’  

The required version can be found in libgtk2.0-dev, so install this using your preferred package manager - for example using apt-get:

 sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev    

Then reload R and:

 install.packages('RGtk2')  

Now, after the installation has finished, you should see:

 * DONE (RGtk2)  

As usual, let me know if it works for you in the comments below.

If you like this blog, and use R for statistical processing, you can help support my writing by purchasing a book from my bookstore. For both beginning and more advanced R users, I'd recommend Kenneth Knoblauch.