R crashes when trying to output/create plot

Question

All of a sudden my system does no want to create plots from inside an R environment.

When I do just something simple like:

>$R

>X11() 

(I can use whatever plotting function of RI want to. Not only X11())

A new windows pops open just like expected but then freezes. It not only freezes the window itself it also freezes the underlying R session. The only way to get out is to xkill the plot window.

After doing that inside R this message pops up:

Error in X11() : X11 fatal IO error: please save work and shut down R

I have Googled through several things but I am not able to solve this. I am working on a CentOS6.7 OS.

sessionInfo()

>R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)
Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: CentOS release 6.7 (Final)

>locale:
> [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8       LC_NUMERIC=C             
> [3] LC_TIME=en_US.utf8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.utf8    
> [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.utf8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8   
> [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.utf8       LC_NAME=C                
> [9] LC_ADDRESS=C              LC_TELEPHONE=C           
>[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.utf8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C      

>attached base packages:
>[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base ` 

Answer 1

Try the following:

1. Include a line to use ggsave to save the plot to a specific file location

2. Save your script from RStudio and quit/kill your session

3. Open a terminal, navigate to the folder with your script, and run it with:

    Rscript your_code.R

4. View the plot in the file location you specified in step 1 above