How to configure R-3.1.2 with --enable-R-shlib

I had installed R-3.1.2 on Ubuntu using the commands

wget http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-3/R-3.1.2.tar.gz
tar xvfz R-3.1.2.tar.gz
cd R-3.1.2
./configure
make
sudo make install

When I tried to launch RStudio I got the error

R shared library (/usr/local/lib/R/lib/libR.so) not found. If this is a custom build of R, was it built with the --enable-R-shlib option?

So I went back and tried to reconfigure with

./configure --enable-R-shlib=yes
make

But I got the error

collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
make[3]: *** [libR.so] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/lib/R-3.1.2/src/main'
make[2]: *** [R] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/lib/R-3.1.2/src/main'
make[1]: *** [R] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/lib/R-3.1.2/src'
make: *** [R] Error 1

When searching stack overflow, I found an answer here: How to configure R-3.0.1 with --enable-R-shlib that suggested that the problem was that I was trying to compile in a directory that I had previously compiled without the "--enable-R-shlib" option

I tried to fix the problem by using the commands

make uninstall

which gives no errors by many "Nothing to be done for `uninstall'." statements, but it did successfully uninstall R

./configure --enable-R-shlib=yes

which gives the error

config.status: error: cannot find input file: `src/library/base/DESCRIPTION.in'

then

make

which gives the same error as when I tried to make before.

Can you help me see where I have gone wrong?

make uninstall only undoes the make install step, which generally copies the files from the compilation dir to dir(s) on the system as appropriate, and puts binaries in say /usr/bin so they are on the path. If you wanted to clean up the dir where you did a previous compile, use make clean (or make distclean, I forget what the difference is now as far as R is concerned but convention is that it should return the build dir to pre-configure, pre-build state.).

You also, in general, don't want to be building in the dir which contains the R sources (which ./configure suggests you are doing).