How to install devtools on Ubuntu

Posted on October 29, 2019

I was following your tutorial [1] on how to install R devtools on Ubuntu but I am stuck at the first step:

sudo apt install build-essential libcurl4-gnutls-dev libxml2-dev libssl-dev

I get an error that some of the packages could not be installed:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libssl-dev : Depends: libssl1.1 (= 1.1.0g-2ubuntu4) but 1.1.1-1ubuntu2.1~18.04.4 is to be installed
              Recommends: libssl-doc but it is not going to be installed
 libxml2-dev : Depends: libicu-dev but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: libxml2 (= 2.9.4+dfsg1-6.1ubuntu1) but 2.9.4+dfsg1-6.1ubuntu1.2 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I tried to search askubuntu.com as well as some forums and tried different solutions listed here but nothing helped. I am using Ubuntu 18.04 and it was a fresh installation (it’s a new laptop). Do you have any idea what I can do about it?

Thank you!

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-r-packages-using-devtools-on-ubuntu-18-04

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