R Commander Mac OS X Installation Notes for Versions of R Before R 3.0.0

These installation notes are intended for Mac OS X users of versions of R prior to R 3.0.0. R version 3.0.0 comes with an X-Windows installation of Tcl/Tk, and it is thus unnecessary to install Tcl/Tk for X Windows in a separate step.

I strongly recommend that you upgrade to the current version of R, and then follow the standard R Commander installation notes for Mac OS X users. Using an old version of R will restrict you to an old version of the R Commander as well, and these old versions are now unsupported.

The Rcmdr package is a standard R package, and it installs and is loaded in the normal manner. There are, however, a few installation issues on Macintosh systems, and these are described in this document.

A general point is keep is mind is that the Rcmdr package uses a number of other "contributed" packages (in addition to packages, such as tcltk and MASS, that are part of the standard R distribution), and these must be present for it to work properly: abind, aplpack, car, colorspace, effects, Hmisc, leaps, lmtest, multcomp, relimp, rgl. Many of these packages have their own dependencies, which depend on still other packages, etc.

Once it is installed, to load the Rcmdr package, just enter the command library(Rcmdr).

The procedure for installing the R Commander under Mac OS X for versions of R prior to 3.0.0 is a bit complicated, so please read and follow these instructions carefully. These instructions and the associated files are intended for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion), and 10.8 (Mountain Lion) systems. I assume that you've already installed R.

            install.packages("Rcmdr")

R will ask you to select a CRAN mirror; pick a mirror site near you.

Last modified: 2015-01-22 by John Fox <jfox AT mcmaster.ca>.