r - Rgdal installation failed on ubuntu 16.04

Question

I have been trying to install rgdal from RStudio Version 1.0.44 on ubuntu 16.04 then I was getting the gdal-config not found error. I resolved this by installing the libgdal1-dev & libproj packages but now i'm getting the following error. Someone help me resolve this.

Error in dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...) : 
unable to load shared object '/home/hetch/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.3/rgdal/libs/rgdal.so':
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgeos_c.so.1: undefined symbol:_ZN4geos4geom18IntersectionMatrixC1ERKNSt7__cxx1112basic_stringIcSt11char_traitsIcESaIcEEE 
Error: loading failed
Execution halted
ERROR: loading failed
* removing ‘/home/hetch/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.3/rgdal’
Warning in install.packages :
installation of package ‘rgdal’ had non-zero exit status

Answer 1

I have had some issues trying to install rgdal package but finally I succeeded. My problem was that gdal > 2.0 is needed, and it does not ship with ubuntu 16.04 by default, so extra packages are needed.

I ended up installing the following packages:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gdal-bin python-gdal python3-gdal libgdal1-dev

Additionally, r > 3.3 is needed too, so I ended up updating ubuntu's default r-base installation like this:

sudo add-apt-repository 'deb https://cran.rediris.es/bin/linux/ubuntu xenial/'
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E084DAB9
sudo apt update

Hope it works for you too.