This failure is reproducible: 1) This requires a machine without "makeinfo". I ran into it on a RedHat 9.0 system, but I doubt the OS matters. 2) unpack the R-2.2.0 source tarball 3) cd R-2.2.0 4) ./configure ; make ; make check ; make install [add configure args as appropriate; works fine] 5) make distclean ; ./configure ; make ; make check ; make install [add configure args as appropriate] The last "make install" fails because "make distclean" removed doc/html/resources.html and makeinfo is needed to rebuild it. Quick fix: extract R-2.2.0/doc/html/resources.html from the tarball and run "make install" again.