“Non Zero Exit Status” R 3.0.1 'XML' and 'RCurl'

Question

I am having a bit of trouble installing XML and RCurl on my Ubuntu machine 13.10. I performed all sudo update and upgrades today.

I am trying to use rattle for R. I am unable to install 'XML' which is required for the use of rattle. This is pretty much the same question that was asked right here just a year later and a different OS. Here are the error messages that I am getting back:

> install.packages("RCurl")
Installing package into ‘/home/steven/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.0’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'http://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/RCurl_1.95-4.1.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 870915 bytes (850 Kb)
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 850 Kb

* installing *source* package ‘RCurl’ ...
** package ‘RCurl’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
checking for curl-config... no
Cannot find curl-config
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘RCurl’
* removing ‘/home/steven/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.0/RCurl’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘RCurl’ had non-zero exit status

The downloaded source packages are in
    ‘/tmp/RtmpUwBkbS/downloaded_packages’
> install.packages("XML")
Installing package into ‘/home/steven/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.0’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'http://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/XML_3.98-1.1.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 1582216 bytes (1.5 Mb)
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 1.5 Mb

* installing *source* package ‘XML’ ...
** package ‘XML’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... 
rm: cannot remove 'a.out.dSYM': Is a directory
a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed
checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E
checking for sed... /bin/sed
checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config
checking for xml2-config... no
Cannot find xml2-config
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘XML’
* removing ‘/home/steven/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.0/XML’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘XML’ had non-zero exit status

The downloaded source packages are in
    ‘/tmp/RtmpUwBkbS/downloaded_packages’

Not too sure on how to proceed from here.

Answer 1

To install curl and xml on Ubuntu. Run

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libxml2-dev

The error messages on package install in R indicate that the curl and xml libraries are not present or cannot be found.

Answer 2

In CentOS 6+ you can do it using

sudo yum -y install curl
sudo yum -y install libcurl libcurl-devel
sudo yum -y install libxml2 libxml2-devel

Answer 3

For those who can't install using yum or apt-get, I share my experience:

I installed libcurl-openssl-dev myself by downloading the source code and compiling. I still ran into the Cannot find curl-config problem though...I didn't know what to do until looking at RCurl source code and seeing a CURL_CONFIG environment variable being referenced. I tried setting this myself in my .bashrc and it seems to have worked:

export CURL_CONFIG=~/my/libcurl/curl-config