In my case R was not built with X support, and I was also missing some openGL libraries. The info I needed was in the README inside the unzipped tarball for rgl. But rgl cleaned up after failing the install, and deleted the README, so I never new the README was there until I manually untarr'ed the tarball and looked inside it. (Error msg from install.packages("rgl") showed where the tarball was.)
I needed to do the following: 1. Rebuild R with X support. Add --with-X to the configure line when building See app.B.1 "Configuration Options" of R Installation & Admin manual ./configure --with-tcltk --with-system-zlib --with-system-bzlib --enable-R-shlib --with-x (note: might need --x-includes=DIR --x-libraries=DIR . Seemed to work without these for me, presumably because they are in the default location) make make check make install 2. Install missing openGL libraries (I'm on RHEL...use apt get on other systems): yum install mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libGLU-devel libpng-devel 3. Install rgl > install.packages("rgl") HTH -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Pkg-rgl-installation-fails-because-of-x11-tp871465p4646017.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.