Even though I have been very busy these days I think I should try to get at least one post published per month. My recent job involved a lot of data analysis and statistical computing. I pushed myself to get familiar with R because some packages from R are indispensable for my work. Meanwhile I also wanted to reuse my existing Octave code. Luckily I get the best of both worlds by using RcppOctave which is a bridging package connecting the R and Octave sessions.

I compiled the latest Octave on the server and installed in my home directory. When installing RcppOctave in R by running

install.packages('RcppOctave')

I ran into an error message like this:

** preparing package for lazy loading
Creating a generic function for ‘show’ from ‘methods’ in package ‘RcppOctave’
    (from the saved implicit definition)
** help
Error : /tmp/Rtmp028JZY/R.INSTALL6dea26e533ee/RcppOctave/man/o_addpath.Rd:40: unable to load
shared object '/home/zandy/lib64/R/library/RcppOctave/libs/RcppOctave.so':
liboctinterp.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

ERROR: installing Rd objects failed for package ‘RcppOctave’
* removing ‘/home/zandy/lib64/R/library/RcppOctave’

The build phase seemed OK. Only did the install phase complain. I spent some time and figured out a work-around is to specify the library path to your liboctinterp.so:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/lib64/octave/3.6.3

I don't know much about the internal mechanism of install.packages otherwise I may be able to fix the problem completely.