[R] Problems with updating R-packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 2 January 2006 at 21:56, Petar Milin wrote:
| Thanks to the detailed help with previous error message, I managed to
| update Design package. However, when I tried to update Matrix and lme4 I
| received an error message again:
| ...
| > /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lblas-3
| > collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
| > make: *** [Matrix.so] Error 1
| > ERROR: compilation failed for package 'Matrix'
| > ** Removing '/usr/lib/R/site-library/Matrix'
| > ** Restoring previous '/usr/lib/R/site-library/Matrix'
| ...
| 
| When I tried to search for lblas-3, following instruction of professor
| Jonathan Baron, Dirk Eddelbuettel and Martin Maechler, I could not find
| it.
| With:
| > dpkg -S lblas-3
| and
| > dpkg -S *-lblas-3*
| I received:
| > dpkg: *-lblas-3* not found.
| 
| Without Matrix, it is not possible to have lme4 updated. Also, I would
| like to have nlme and some other packages. The question is how should I
| procees and not be tedious with questions to the Mailing list?

You could start on the r-sig-debian mailing list where we could have told you
that _all_ of these packages are available as native Debian (and hence native
Ubuntu) packages.  So get in the habit of doing 'apt-cache search $foo' for
various values of $foo -- there may be more than you think.  

Now, for your questions, the *blas-3 libs are tricky as they are 'virtual' --
actual libraries are provided by a variety of packages, including the
(non-optimised) reference blas and the various (optmised) atlas libraries of
which base, as well as one matching your cpu, are suitable.

You never told us if you installed r-base-dev which via it Depends: line
tries to ensure you have one of the *blas-3 libraries installed:

Source: r-base
Version: 2.2.1-1
Depends: r-base-core (= 2.2.1-1), refblas3-dev | atlas3-base-dev | 
  libblas-3.so,  ....

Hth, Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison