This post pertains to Ubuntu / Debian users only.

rattle is a free graphical interface for data mining with R. I wanted to visualize decision trees and had to install this library.
> install.packages('rattle')
got me the following error message:

configure: error: GTK version 2.8.0 required
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘RGtk2’

This error occurs when attempting to install the RGtk2 package. The install is looking for the header files for GTK. Possibly they are not yet. Luckily the problem can be solved quite easily. Open Terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and type in the following commands:


sudo apt-get update
wajig install libgtk2.0-dev


Go back and try installing rattle now with the same command as earlier. It should work. It did for me! As you can see below, decision trees are visualized lot better with rattle than if you used just rpart.