Installing geoR on Ubuntu 16.04

Question

I'm having issues installing the geoR package on ubuntu 16.04, when I run

>install.packages('geoR', dependencies = TRUE)

I get the following error message

/usr/lib/R/etc/Makeconf:141: recipe for target 'RFoptions.o' failed
make: *** [RFoptions.o] Error 1
ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘RandomFieldsUtils’
* removing ‘/home/luca/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/RandomFieldsUtils’

The downloaded source packages are in
    ‘/tmp/Rtmph5zmhR/downloaded_packages’
Warning message:
In install.packages("RandomFieldsUtils") :
  installation of package ‘RandomFieldsUtils’ had non-zero exit status
> 
> install.packages('geoR', dependencites = TRUE)
Installing package into ‘/home/luca/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
also installing the dependencies ‘RandomFieldsUtils’, ‘RandomFields’

Error in download.file(url, destfile, method, mode = "wb", ...) : 
  unused argument (dependencites = TRUE)
Warning in download.packages(pkgs, destdir = tmpd, available = available,  :
  download of package ‘RandomFieldsUtils’ failed
Error in download.file(url, destfile, method, mode = "wb", ...) : 
  unused argument (dependencites = TRUE)
Warning in download.packages(pkgs, destdir = tmpd, available = available,  :
  download of package ‘RandomFields’ failed
Error in download.file(url, destfile, method, mode = "wb", ...) : 
  unused argument (dependencites = TRUE)
Warning in download.packages(pkgs, destdir = tmpd, available = available,  :
  download of package ‘geoR’ failed

It seems to me that the issue is with the RandomFieldsUtils package, and also when I try to run

>install.packages('RandomFieldsUtils')

I get the same error

/usr/lib/R/etc/Makeconf:141: recipe for target 'RFoptions.o' failed
make: *** [RFoptions.o] Error 1

ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘RandomFieldsUtils’
* removing ‘/home/luca/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/RandomFieldsUtils’

The downloaded source packages are in
    ‘/tmp/Rtmph5zmhR/downloaded_packages’
Warning message:
In install.packages("RandomFieldsUtils") :
  installation of package ‘RandomFieldsUtils’ had non-zero exit status

I'm pretty new to R and tried this both in R Studio and in the Ubuntu console, got the same message twice.

Any idea how to fix it?

thanks in advance

Answer 1

After playing around a bit, I managed by downloading the second-to-latest version of RandomFieldsUtils (i.e. 0.3.16 instead of 0.3.20) directly from the contributor's website and installing it from the package.

Posting this answer to myself in case it can help anybody!