[ESS] ess-remote trouble

[Dan Davison]

Matthew Keller <mckellercran at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> At this very moment, I came onto the ESS help boards because I was
> having this same issue, and lo and behold, a post about it 9 minutes
> ago! (What are the chances of that??)
>
> I am currently using
> 1) M-x shell
> 2) ssh -XC user at host
> 3) R
> 4) M-x ess-remote <r>
>
> I did this for two different processes. I had to rename the first one
> "Session2" so that commands would go from the appropriate .R buffer.
> About 10 minutes into this, the prompt on the first buffer stopped
> working.
>
> This is but one of many problems I've had using M-x shell and so I'm
> ready to move on to other alternatives for using emacs remotely.
>
> Could someone either explain how to get around this M-x shell issue,
> or direct me to simple instructions for how to use tramp? I don't

Hi Matthew,

I've only recently started using this method, but I think it might be as
simple as M-x R, and then when prompted for the working directory
entering something of the form

/user at host:/path/to/dir

(see http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Filename-Syntax)

This relies on ess-ask-for-ess-directory being non-nil, and R being in
tramp-remote-path. You could also have ess-ask-for-ess-directory set to
nil, and use M-x cd with the tramp remote file syntax to change the
current buffer's directory (i.e. the buffer-local value of
default-directory), before starting R.

Dan

> understand exactly what to do to start tramp up and how to use it. Any
> help would be appreciated...
>
> Matt
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Ross Boylan <ross at biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2010-02-12 at 12:02 -0500, Dan Davison wrote:
>>>
>>> But no, that doesn't solve the problems with an inactive prompt when
>>> using ess-remote with M-x shell. However, I see that the ESS
>>> documentation suggests using M-x ssh, not M-x shell, and this seems to
>>> work fine. So perhaps I'm reporting problems with something that's not
>>> encouraged usage.
>> I've been using ESS remote without problems.  I don't recall all the
>> details now, but I think I used M-x shell and then ssh.  I'm on Debian
>> lenny, and so have the oldish ESS 5.3.8 (svn 3917).
>>
>> It might help to check if the remote R is using lots of CPU (or disk
>> accesses if you can check that).
>>
>> Perhaps the remote R is trying to popup a window and either failing, or
>> waiting forever for you to respond to the window.  The delay might be in
>> the error condition arising, e.g., from lack of resources.
>>
>> Ross Boylan
>>
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>>