Unable to install rJava in R 3.0 in Ubuntu 13.04

Posted on Jul 16, 2023

Question

I am not able to call rJava package in R 3.0. I got the following message

Error: package ‘rJava’ was built before R 3.0.0: please re-install it

I am getting error when I tried to re-install rJava package. I have provided the output of R CMD javareconf

Java interpreter : /usr/bin/java
Java version     : 1.7.0_21
Java home path   : /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/jre
Java compiler    : /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/jre/../bin/javac
Java headers gen.: /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/jre/../bin/javah
Java archive tool: /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/jre/../bin/jar

trying to compile and link a JNI progam detected JNI cpp flags : detected JNI linker flags : gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -fpic -O2 -pipe -g -c conftest.c -o conftest.o conftest.c:1:17: fatal error: jni.h: No such file or directory compilation terminated. make: *** [conftest.o] Error 1 Unable to compile a JNI program

Java library path: JNI cpp flags : JNI linker flags : Updating Java configuration in /usr/lib/R Done.

I am using Ubuntu 13.04. I also tried apt-get install r-cran-rjava which is not helping to solve the issue. Regarding jni.h there were some solution here. But, not sure how can I use the solution here.

Answer

I ran into the exact same issue. My solution was to install the openjdk-7-* via

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-*

Followed that with

sudo R CMD javareconf

and I was then able to install rJava in R via install.packages("rJava").

While perhaps not the most elegant solution it appears to have solved my problems with getting rJava to work.