Connect to and run R on another host

[torbjorn]

Would it be possible, and implementable, to connect to an R session on another host, perhaps using ssh, perhaps with tramp.

X-forward will probably be tricky, but personally I'd be happy to run R with DISPLAY=:1 in for example vnc on that other host and just connect with a vnc viewer to see graphics.

[vspinu]

I am not aware of a direct method. People are using screen. I never used
it myself but this is how (I think) it works. Start emacs shell, connect
to remote host with ssh, run screen then run R. You can disconnect the
session and connect again later. There must be instructions on the web.

Please if you find anything useful please post here. I will add it to
the ESS documentation.

Torbjørn Lindahl on Tue, 29 Oct 2013 02:47:22 -0700 wrote:

Would it be possible, and implementable, to connect to an R session on another
host, perhaps using ssh, perhaps with tramp.

X-forward will probably be tricky, but personally I'd be happy to run R with
DISPLAY=:1 in for example vnc on that other host and just connect with a vnc
viewer to see graphics.

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[DarwinAwardWinner]

You can't connect to an existing R session on another host, but you can start one by selecting a remote TRAMP directory as the starting directory. Make sure to disable tracebug and developer modes, since they don't know how to pass data to remote R processes.

[DarwinAwardWinner]

As for graphics, if you set up your ~/.ssh/config to always forward X11 (see below), then graphics will just work (very slowly, of course).

To enable X11 forwarding for all hosts, add the following in your ~/.ssh/config:

Host *
ForwardX11 yes

You can also put in a specific host name instead of *.

[vspinu]

Good point. Thanks. I am adding this to ESS manual. For this to work you need to have x server installed and R to be compiled with X support, and what else? I guess most machines comply with that requirement. amazon ubuntu servers definitely do.

I will try to add screen support by 14.03.

[DarwinAwardWinner]

I'm not exactly sure of all the requirements to do remote graphics. I had the X11 forwarding set up long before I was using ESS, so I just tried it and it worked. But I can say that I use R remotely through ESS and TRAMP quite often.

[torbjorn]

I tend to use vnc when I work like this, it makes your work session less
lagging.

Sys.setenv( DISPLAY=":1" ) # on remote R, if I ran vncserver on display :1
, and then plot as normal and connect to it with a vnc viewer.

T:

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 8:44 AM, Ryan Thompson notifications@github.comwrote:

I'm not exactly sure of all the requirements to do remote graphics. I had
the X11 forwarding set up long before I was using ESS, so I just tried it
and it worked.

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.

mvh
Torbjørn Lindahl