The problem is that the sources.list line is seen as having a syntax 
error when there is no entry after "quantal" (e.g. main, or universe, 
etc.) on the line. So it doesn't matter which repository name I put in 
it.  I have tried several (including the one you suggest) already.

Here is the offending line from my /etc/apt/sources.list file

deb http://cran.us.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/ quantal

Does your system have exactly this line, or some variation on it?

On 11/15/2012 01:02 PM, Douglas Bates wrote:
> I suggest you try another CRAN mirror. I use cran.us.r-project.org 
> <http://cran.us.r-project.org> and don't have any problems.  As that 
> mirror is the site of the Bioconductor project, they are very good 
> about keeping the mirror up to date.
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Chris Sims <sims@princeton.edu 
> <mailto:sims@princeton.edu>> wrote:
>
>     Since upgrading to quantal, I find that synaptic and apt-get
>     cannot read the sources.list file if it includes the previously
>     standard line
>
>     deb http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/R/CRAN/bin/linux/ubuntu/ quantal
>
>     This line makes apt-get or synaptic give an error message
>     identifying this line as having a syntax error.
>
>     If "multiverse" is added at the end of the line, the line is
>     parsed, but then apt-get or synaptic looks for non-existent
>     directories on the server.
>
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