When I run Gnumeric I get errors about not being able to find the function

When I print values in functions called from Gnumeric, everything seems to be out of order?

The order in which the cells are evaluated is not specified and so the calls to the S functions can come in a different order than you might expect.

I installed the plugin, but I can't call any R functions.

There are two possiblities:

• you haven't activated the plugin, and/or
• you haven't actually exported any functions

To activate the plugin, follow these instructions

To export a function, follow these instructions.

I forgot to set my LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include R_HOME/bin and now the plugin never starts?

Gnumeric de-activates a plugin when it fails to start. You will need to reactivate it.

How do I make R functions available to gnumeric? Do I have to tell gnumeric about all R functions?

Yes, you have to explicitly register functions with Gnumeric. This is because Gnumeric needs to know about the types of the arguments, etc.
To export functions from R to Gnumeric, you specify a file that the R plugin should read when it is initialized. In this file, you export functions by repeated calls to gnumeric.registerFunction().

These calls to gnumeric.registerFunction() can be in a profile script that is read when R starts, or in a file that is read when the R plugin is started. There are several potential startup files that R reads:

• specified by the environment variable R_PROFILE
• $R_HOME/etc/Rprofile
• $HOME/.Rprofile

Finally, the plugin reads each of the additional files (if they exist) in the following order

• ~/.gnumeric/Rprofile
• ~/.gnumeric/gnumeric-versionRprofile
• the value of the environment variable R_GNUMERIC_PROFILE

These can add progressively more specific code.

Building Gnumeric

Dependencies

Compiling a version of Gnumeric from source may require updating numerous related Gnome libraries. These are the ones that I had to update (on a Yellow Dog Linux box)

• libglade
• gnome-print
• gal
• libole2

libole2

I had to manually put libole2Conf.sh into /usr/lib.

When I try to build RGnumeric, I tell it where the Gnumeric source is (via the environment variable GNUMERIC_DIR), but I get error messages like

Gnumeric.c:13: error: `GNUMERIC_VERSION' undeclared here (not in a function)
RGnumeric.c:13: error: initializer element is not constant
RGnumeric.c:13: error: (near initialization for `plugin_file_struct.gnumeric_plugin_version')
make: *** [RGnumeric.o] Error 1

What's the problem?

This typically means that you have merely untarred the Gnumeric source but have not configured it. While you don't have to compile Gnumeric, you do have to configure it. So the commands

    cd $GNUMERIC_DIR
    ./configure

will set things up so that installing RGnumeric should work.