[R] download CRAN packages and proxy config.

[Joao Pedro W. de Azevedo]

Dear R users,

I'm starting to get acquainted with R. I've been reading the manual, and I
understood that if I wanted to install a user written package on R, I could
do it directly from the Internet, by typing the line
install.packages("quantreg") in an R session.

To my surprise this command did not work, nor did the command "update
packages from CRAN..." from the menu option. In the latter I got the
following error message:

<- CRAN.packages()
+ install.packages(select.list(a[,1],,TRUE), .libPaths()[1], available=a)}
trying URL `http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/PACKAGES'
unable to connect to 'cran.r-project.org'.
Error in download.file(url = paste(contriburl, "PACKAGES", sep = "/"),  :
        cannot open URL
`http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/PACKAGES'
>

The strange thing was that I was able to visit the internet address the R
was trying to connect, from my web browser. Thus I imagine that the problem
was a proxy issue on R.

I would sincerely appreciate if one of the more experience R user could help
me to sort this issue out. I found a way to configure my proxy setting by
typing on the main window '"http://wwwcache.ncl.ac.uk:8080/"', however it
didn't seem to have worked, as I kept getting the same error message when I
tried to connect the CRAN.

Any help would be extremely appreciated,

Joao Pedro/