title: Error installing RCurl as part of devtools for R in Linux
body: <p>To preface, I am fairly new to Linux.  I installed R 3.1.1 (the most recent version) on a Linux Server (Ubuntu 12.10, Quantal Quetzal), and am trying to install the devtools package in R.  When I run the <code>install.packages("devtools")</code> command, I receive the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Cannot find curl-config
  ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘RCurl’
  ...
  Warning messages:
  1: In install.packages("devtools", dependencies = TRUE) :
    installation of package ‘RCurl’ had non-zero exit status
  2: In install.packages("devtools", dependencies = TRUE) :
    installation of package ‘httr’ had non-zero exit status
  3: In install.packages("devtools", dependencies = TRUE) :
    installation of package ‘devtools’ had non-zero exit status
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried all of the commands from the other relevant StackOverflow answers (see bottom of post), but none of them worked.  For example, if I type <code>sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev</code>, I get the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Err http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-security/main libssl-doc all 1.0.1c-3ubuntu2.5
    404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.201 80]
  Failed to fetch http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/o/openssl/libssl1.0.0_1.0.1c-3ubuntu2.5_amd64.deb  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.201 80]
  ...
  Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've tried running <code>apt-get update</code> but that didn't allow me to install libcurl either.</p>
  
  <p>Here's my sources.list file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal main
  deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-updates main
  deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-security main
  deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal universe
  deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-updates universe
  
  deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu quantal/
  deb-src http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu quantal/
  deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu raring/
  deb-src http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu raring/
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried changing 'archive' to 'old-releases' in sources.list, but it could not find any of the libcurl libraries: libcurl4-openssl-dev, libcurl4-nss-dev, or libcurl4-gnutls-dev.</p>
  
  <p>I also tried installing Curl 7.37.1 <a href="http://curl.haxx.se/download.html" rel="nofollow">from source</a>, and it installed correctly.  Doing that allowed me to install the RCurl package but then I receive an error when trying to use the install_github() function within R: <code>install_github('rCharts', 'ramnathv')</code>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE) : Protocol https not supported or disabled in libcurl
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm not sure if this is a problem with libcurl, RCurl, devtools, or my older Linux distro.  Not sure where to go from here.  Here are the related questions I've consulted:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20923209/problems-installing-the-devtools-package">Problems installing the devtools package</a></p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20671814/non-zero-exit-status-r-3-0-1-xml-and-rcurl">&quot;Non Zero Exit Status&quot; R 3.0.1 &#39;XML&#39; and &#39;RCurl&#39;</a></p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20236726/unable-to-install-devtools-package-for-r-studio-mounted-on-linux-redhat-server">Unable to install Devtools package for R studio mounted on linux redhat server</a></p>