[R-sig-Debian] R CMD INSTALL cannot find libf77blas

[Douglas Bates]

I feel like Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront" where he's told "It's
not your night, kid", except for me it has been the last two months
trying to debug memory problems.  Now I can't even install an old
version of this package on a netbook running the  Ubuntu 10.10 netbook
remix because it can't find the libraries libf77blas and libatlas.

I have even gone to the extent of removing the r-base-core package
entirely and removing libatlas3gf-base then reinstalling everything.
I still get


bates at eeek:/var/tmp$ R CMD INSTALL lme4_0.999375-37.tar.gz
* installing to library ‘/home/bates/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.12’
* installing *source* package ‘lme4’ ...
** libs
gcc -I/usr/share/R/include   -I"/usr/lib/R/library/Matrix/include"
-I"/usr/lib/R/library/stats/include"   -fpic  -std=gnu99 -O3 -pipe  -g
-c init.c -o init.o
gcc -I/usr/share/R/include   -I"/usr/lib/R/library/Matrix/include"
-I"/usr/lib/R/library/stats/include"   -fpic  -std=gnu99 -O3 -pipe  -g
-c lmer.c -o lmer.o
gcc -I/usr/share/R/include   -I"/usr/lib/R/library/Matrix/include"
-I"/usr/lib/R/library/stats/include"   -fpic  -std=gnu99 -O3 -pipe  -g
-c local_stubs.c -o local_stubs.o
gcc -shared -o lme4.so init.o lmer.o local_stubs.o -llapack -lf77blas
-latlas -lgfortran -lm -L/usr/lib/R/lib -lR
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lf77blas
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -latlas
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [lme4.so] Error 1
ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘lme4’
* removing ‘/home/bates/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.12/lme4’

The thing that seems to be missing in /usr/lib/ is a symbolic link
from libatlas.so.3gf to libatlas.so.  All I have is


  lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root           33 2011-01-28 09:37
libatlas.so.3gf -> /etc/alternatives/libatlas.so.3gf

Can someone tell me if I should see a link from libatlas.so.3gf to libatlas.so?