R Programming By Example

Dependencies for the rgl and rgdal R packages

Chapter 5, Communicating Sales with Visualizations, makes use of the rgl and rgdal packages to create 3D and geographical data graphs. These two packages have the trickiest external dependencies from the ones we will see in this book, so we will provide different ways of installing them in case one of them is not useful for you.

We need to install GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) system libraries (http://www.gdal.org/) with geospatial, and X11 (https://www.x.org/wiki/) in Ubuntu or Xquartz (https://www.xquartz.org/) in macOS to create windows with dynamic content.

In the case of Windows, you don't need something external like X11 or Xquartz, since Windows handles the necessary windows ...