R, install.packages('devtools') bug

Question

I can't seem to install devtools. I always get this message (at the end):

  * 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/vapri/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.0/RCurl’
  Warning in install.packages :
    installation of package ‘RCurl’ had non-zero exit status
  ERROR: dependency ‘RCurl’ is not available for package ‘httr’
  * removing ‘/home/vapri/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.0/httr’
  Warning in install.packages :
    installation of package ‘httr’ had non-zero exit status
  ERROR: dependencies ‘httr’, ‘RCurl’ are not available for package ‘devtools’
  * removing ‘/home/vapri/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.0/devtools’
  Warning in install.packages :
    installation of package ‘devtools’ had non-zero exit status

The downloaded source packages are in
    ‘/tmp/RtmpqLDAb0/downloaded_packages’

Can someone tell me whats up? I am using Ubuntu 14.04, some research seems to imply that may be the issue.

Answer 1

Look more closely:

 checking for curl-config... no
  Cannot find curl-config

You need the curl-config script. In general, you want a package libcurl*-dev or alike, and the aming may vary between distros. On the system on which I type this:

edd@max:~$ dpkg -S `which curl-config`
libcurl4-nss-dev: /usr/bin/curl-config
edd@max:~$ 

but there is also an alternate libcurl4-gnutls-dev which I use on some other systems, as well as libcurl4-openssl-dev.

Answer 2

Helped me.

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