I get on debian/etch the following, with foreign installed from r-cran-foreign: > library(foreign) Error in dyn.load(x, as.logical(local), as.logical(now)) : unable to load shared library '/usr/lib/R/library/foreign/libs/foreign.so': /usr/lib/R/library/foreign/libs/foreign.so: undefined symbol: Rf_allocString Error: package/namespace load failed for 'foreign' Local installation works fine. Bests, -- Edzer