Install gdata failed (on 64 bit Linux)

Question

i was working on a R Script, which uses gplots Library. Therefore at some point of the script

library(gplots)

is called. This works great using a 32 bit linux box (Linux an 3.2.0-33-generic-pae 52-Ubuntu SMP i686 GNU/Linux, Ubuntu 12.04).
However, I tried running the script on a 64 bit machine (Linux sim 2.6.38-15-server 66-Ubuntu SMP x86_64 GNU/Linux;Ubuntu 11.04) and now it throws errors:

Error in library(gplots) : there is no package called 'gplots'
Calls: generateHeatmap -> library
Execution halted

So when I try to install gplots it raises another error:

> install.packages('gplots', type="source", dependencies=T)
ERROR: dependency ‘gdata’ is not available for package ‘gplots’
* removing ‘/home/schaller/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.12/gplots’
...

Thus, I am trying to install gdata:

>install.packages('gdata', type="source", dependencies=F)
Installing package(s) into ‘/home/schaller/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.12’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Warning message:
In getDependencies(pkgs, dependencies, available, lib) :
  package ‘gdata’ is not available

I've searched online for possible solutions. I Couldn't find any. However, I read that gdata is broken on current R versions in 64 bit mode. Someone posted a patched repo [1], but I couldn't use this a repo for installing gdata. So this means there is no possibility for using this package on a 64 bit machine for now?

[1] - https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2010-April/236966.html

Further info: R version 2.12.1

---

ANSWER: Updating r-base to the current version fixed the problem.

Answer 1

You should be able to just do

$ sudo apt-get install r-cran-gplots

after which both gdata and gplots are installed from the Ubuntu repo.

You can of course also use whichever package management frontend you prefer.