[R] Problems installing quantreg

[Douglas Bates]

mark engle wrote:
> 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.

How was your R or r-base-core installed?  If it came from one of Dirk's 
Debian packages it should already have a dependency on one of the atlas3 
packages (either atlas3-base or atlas3-sse or atlas3-sse2 or 
atlas3-3dnow) that provides a blas-3 library.

I would suggest installing one of the atlas3 packages (sse2 for recent 
Pentium or 3dnow for a recent Athlon chip).

Although the arrangements with the atlas3 packages are complex they 
provide a great performance boost on some linear algebra operations with 
large matrices.