Cannot install ggplot2: “Error in library.dynam(lib, package, package.lib) : shared object ‘stringi.so’ not found”

Question

Last week I upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 to 14.10. The first time I\'ve tried to use ggplot in RStudio since the update, I\'m getting dependancy errors with my ggplot package

Answer 1

Following @Nick Kennedey's comment, I tried installing stringi like this:

> install.packages("stringi",dep=TRUE)

Which resulted in this error I hadn't seen before:

2015-08-07 10:26:35 (256 KB/s) - ‘/tmp/RtmpQI4Uau/downloaded_packages/stringi_0.5-5.tar.gz’ saved [3639183/3639183]

ERROR: failed to lock directory ‘/home/james/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.1’ for modifying
Try removing ‘/home/james/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.1/00LOCK-stringi’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘stringi’ had non-zero exit status

The downloaded source packages are in
    ‘/tmp/RtmpQI4Uau/downloaded_packages’
> install.packages("stringi",dep=TRUE)

So the I followed the suggestion in the error an removed the LOCK folder.

In the terminal: rm -r /home/james/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.1/00LOCK-stringi’

Then tried installing the stringi package again, and it worked! This was the issue... now I've just finished installing with no issues.

I am still a little bit confused though... as to how this error can come about. Any ideas on what causes this so I can avoid it in the future? Is it possible it was a symptom of my recent upgrade to 14.10?

Answer 2

Got the same error while installing install.packages("knitr")

Error in dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...) : unable to load shared object '/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/stringi/libs/stringi.so'

I solved it by doing the below:

In Ubuntu 16.04 and above

sudo apt install r-cran-stringi

In earlier versions (which had apt-get)

sudo apt-get install r-cran-stringi

Answer 3

In my case I solved the problem through installing stringi and ggplot2 from the terminal of linux. The problem has some relation with RStudio.