lme4 package install failing on Ubuntu 12.04

Question

EDIT :

Many thanks to user20650, whose answer solved this problem. But if anyone knows why the .Rprofile file affects

Answer 1

Based on your comments and expanded questions:

• You are shooting yourself in the foot by installing R 3.1.0 onto Ubuntu 12.04.

• You now run an R that is out of sync with packages like r-cran-lme4 in the distro.

• The good news is that you can ask the distribution for information about the so-called Build-Depends it knows, and rebuild lme4 under R 3.1.0

• Or can benefit from Michael's other work over at launchpad and use his other repo which is what eg the r-travis code does: sudo add-apt-repository -y "ppa:marutter/rrutter" followed by and sudo add-apt-repository -y "ppa:marutter/c2d4u"

That last step will give you loads of pre-built packages. In the long run you are of course better off being to able to build packages from source yourself...