Thanks Mikkel, Tony and Markku. I had indeed not installed all the necessary development libraries. However when I had downloaded all the necessary libs the package seemed to compile OK but it still could not complete the installation. After some searching I discovered this was happening because both R.i386 and R.x86_64 (and both R-devel.i386 and R-devel.x86_64) were installed (on an F8.x86_64 machine). Things were getting mixed up during compile/install! I had to remove all 4 these packages and then reinstall only R.x86_64 and R-devel.x86_64 before it would complete properly. Why did yum install both R.86_64 and R.i386 when only the first is needed? Alexander
