[R] problem with installation of packages

[Vikas Rawal]

Dear Professor Ripley,

Your diagnosis was absolutely right and I have been able to solve my
problem. I had looked up the archives and R Faq for similar problems
before posting, but they all pertained to windows. In fact you had
replied to the posts pointing to RW Faq. But these all pertained to
windows and the same issue is not discussed for some reason in Faq for
linux.

> That is an issue specific to your setup, but why is someone mailing
from 
> an Indian address using a mirror in the USA?  (Your signature is
missing: 
> please see the R posting guide.)

I used the USA mirror because the Indian mirrors do not show up in the
list that pops up. I have always wondered why. 

> How do you _know_ 'The http_proxy is correctly set'?: no evidence is 
> provided here and proxy problems remain the most likely cause.  You
can 
> debug your setup via options(internet.info=0), but we cannot do it for

> you.

What led me to believe the proxy was set correctly was that I was able
to download the packages using wget. My instinct was that wget and R
would both pick up the proxy settings from the same system variable.
There are obviously things about this part that I do not understand.

> >This is a machine running debian sarge. The http_proxy is correctly
> >set. I am able to download the package by using wget. I also tried
> >starting R with (R http_proxy-http://my-proxy/). That does not help
> >either.
> 
> As it is syntactically invalid, it will not.  Perhaps
> 
> $ http_proxy="http://my-proxy/" R

This indeed solved the problem. Thanks very much.

Vikas