[R] Problems installing quantreg

[mark engle]

Hi All,
 I'm trying to install the quantreg library on my MEPIS box (debian-based 
linux).  When I try >install.packages("quantreg") it fails to loads and 
errors with: /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lblas-3.  I tried installing a ton of 
packages to fix the missing part but the only thing I manage to do it cause 
problems with another shared library and had to re-install a couple of 
packages to even get R to run again (It's pretty late here and I'm just too 
tired to remember all the packages I messed with) .

As a work around I tried downloading an .rpm for the package and converting it 
to a .deb using alien.  I then installed the .deb through kpackage.  It 
installed without any complaints and I can run the library command with 
quantreg.  However when I try to run a quantreg command (in this case, rq) at 
the R prompt, I get: "Error: Object "rq" not found".  This suggests to me 
that the package hasn't really installed itself or isn't working properly.

Does anyone have any ideas?  I'd really like to be able to use this library 
with R.  In fact at the moment R doesn't do me much good without it.
Thanks.

-ME