[R] problem with missing package

[Eric Elguero]

Hi everybody,

I just tried to run R on one of my projects
but it did not want to run:



R version 2.12.1 (2010-12-16)
Copyright (C) 2010 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

<some lines deleted>

Loading required package: utils
Error in loadNamespace(i[[1L]], c(lib.loc, .libPaths())) : 
  there is no package called 'nlme'
Fatal error: unable to restore saved data in .RData


there are two things I do not understand:

i) I had actually nlme installed, and working,
but when I look in /usr/lib/R/library/nlme
I find only a text file named "COPYING"
and containing the gnu license.
Where is the package gone? (by itself)

ii) I tried to reinstall nlme but could not
find it in the usual repositories.

in any case, I would like to recover at least those R objects
that do not depend on nlme.

I tried : 

$mv .RData xxx
$R
>load("xxx")

but that doesn't help. 

Is there a method to extract some information from .RData 
without loading it?
 
Eric Elguero