Updated 2018 March 23rd for R-3.4.4
I use a lot of shortcuts provided by GNU Readline. I recently compiled R without Readline support and it was almost unusable! This was because I ran into the error:
configure: error: --with-readline=yes (default) and headers/libs are not available
To circumvent this I compiled R by running:
./configure --with-readline=no --with-x=no
and I do not recommend it.
To fix this, I downloaded and compiled the latest GNU Readline source.
# I have a source directory in my home directory cd ~/src wget -c -N https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-7.0.tar.gz tar -xzf readline-7.0.tar.gz cd readline-7.0/ ./configure --prefix=`pwd` make make install
Now download the latest version (as of this writing) of the R source.
cd ~/src wget -c -N https://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-3/R-3.4.4.tar.gz tar -xzf R-3.4.4.tar.gz cd R-3.4.4/
Add these two lines to the config.site file but change /home/dtang to your own home directory (or where ever you downloaded and compiled Readline).
CPPFLAGS='-I/home/dtang/src/readline-7.0/include/'
LDFLAGS='-L/home/dtang/src/readline-7.0/lib/'
In addition, we need to define the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environmental variable to the directory of the readline libraries. Despite specifying -L, the GNU linker (ld) does not look in the specified directory. Once again, change /home/dtang accordingly.
# run this line in the terminal export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/dtang/src/readline-7.0/lib/
Now R should happily compile (if you’re not missing more libraries; see below).
# note I don't use the X Window System ./configure --prefix=`pwd` --with-x=no --enable-R-shlib=yes make make install
Addendum
If you get the error: “Error in RStudioGD() : Shadow graphics device error: r error 4 (R code execution error)”, run capabilities().
capabilities() No protocol specified jpeg png tiff tcltk X11 aqua http/ftp sockets libxml TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE fifo cledit iconv NLS profmem cairo ICU long.double libcurl TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
You will need to compile with “–with-cairo=yes” and have “cairo-devel” and “pango-devel” installed.
sudo yum install cairo-devel pango-devel
On a clean installation of RHEL7, these should be all the required headers for compiling R-3.5.1.
sudo yum install readline-devel # "X11 headers/libs are not available" sudo yum install libXt-devel sudo yum install zlib-devel sudo yum install bzip2-devel sudo yum install xz xz-devel sudo yum install pcre-devel sudo yum install libcurl-devel sudo yum reinstall libcurl curl libcurl-devel sudo yum install cairo-devel pango-devel libpng-devel sudo yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel sudo mkdir -p /opt/R/3.5.1 ./configure --prefix=/opt/R/3.5.1 --with-x=yes --enable-R-shlib=yes --with-cairo=yes --with-libpng=yes make sudo make install
Lastly, create an .Rprofile file in your home directory and set .libPaths to specify where you want to install your R packages.
.libPaths("/home/dtang/working_data_01/R/packages/")

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