Thanks for the good replies. 1. "build-essential" -- this is likely the essential thing that I forgot. I tend to leave running machines alone (for years at a time) so forget things like this. My laptop is Fedore core 6 I think, when the prior laptop died. I did remember bin-utils though. 2. "See the R Admin manual". I read that pretty closely looking for hints. Perhaps the build-essential hint would be a good addition to the manual. 3. "'r-sig-debian' for Ubuntu questions": I never make that connection. 4. "Current binaries for R can be found at..." Also a good plan. But I may need to build R-devel (for the ShortRead package in bioconductor, to deal with Solexa sequencer data) so I wanted to work the bugs out. 5. "It worked for me" Useful too, since it told me it had to be something SIMPLE that I had overlooked. Thanks to Frank Harrell, Berwin Turlach, Chuck Taylor, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Roland Rau, Kjetil Halvorsen. Terry Therneau