I have been recently attempting to install and update some new R packages on my Ubuntu 12.10 machine, namely "rfishbase" and "phytools" (and their depends).
Unfortunately I got the fairly opaque error message: "installation of package had non-zero exit status".
After a bit of hunting I realised I was missing some development files from the Ubuntu install that are used to compile the package code. After installing these with the following commands, the packages installed in R no problem.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libglu1-mesa-dev
