Running Rattle on Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) - r

Question

After installing Mavericks on my Mac, I'm not able to run Rattle anymore.
Because of compatibility issues between RStudio and 10.9 (http://www.r-bloggers.com/rstudio-and-os-x-10-9-mavericks/), I installed v 0.98.433 of RStudio and R 3.0.2
Tried to launch Rattle the normal way: none.
I tried in a different way:
I manually launched xQuartz to install GTK+
via R-Studio I installed RGtg2 and Cairo
Installed Rattle, launched it and I got 1 sec message from Rattle, before it disappeared, crashing R session.
I then tried going back to R 2.15.3 (using RSwitch), doing same procedure.
Rattle starts with no ricognizable character and a bunch of related error messages on the RStudio console, from Pango.
Problem is it is looking for a directory .../pango/1.6.0 that does not exist (I have /1.8.0).
Is there any one who came out with a working combination of R/RStudio/Rattle on Mavericks?
I have a course I'm going to teach on data mining next semester and I introduced Rattle as the core tool, but I need it running.
Going back to previous Mac OS is not an option, because students may have the latest version.
Any help would be highly appreciated

Answer 1

I believe that the problem is with the GTK2 and Cairo modules. After building a few packages from source, rattle works for me...
I have had difficulties with Cairo/GTK2 since Mountain Lion. I got crashes using Simon's binary packages for these. Note that I updated my system to Mavericks, so I have not tried this on a clean install... I also have Homebrew installed for building programs from source. I use the ATT binary installer for R (thanks, Simon) for most packages but build a few packages from source. There were some hiccups and I spent a lot of time searching with Google. Here is what I did:
One needs XCode and the Xcode command line tools installed. After you install XCode, you need to run
sudo xcode-select --install
to install the command line tools. Then install Homebrew according to directions from the web site... Install gtk+ and cairo with their dependencies with:
brew install gtk+ cairo
And wait quite a while for everything to build....
The first problem I had is that I couldn't build any R packages from source because of this error:
make: llvm-gcc-4.2: No such file or directory
Google to the rescue...
I needed to change two lines in Makeconf in /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/etc to
CC=clang
CXX=clang++
Note: the R Mac Tools page now says this should be:
CC=/usr/local/clang4/bin/clang
CXX=/usr/local/clang4/bin/clang++
LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/clang4/lib
Then download the source packages for RGtk2, Cairo, and cairoDevice. I do all the work in my ~/bld directory with:
cd ~/bld
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig:/Library/Frameworks/GTK+.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
R CMD install RGtk2_2.20.25.tar.gz
R CMD install Cairo_1.5-2.tar.gz
R CMD install cairoDevice_2.19.tar.gz
Hope this helps.