Trouble getting latest version of GDAL on ubuntu running R

Question

My Ubuntu machine has latest GDAL (2.2.1, released 2017/06/23). But R complains that I have gdalversion <2.0

configure: CC: gcc -std=gnu99 configure: CXX: g++ che

Answer 1

You may need to uninstall all traces of gdal then re-install it from the ubuntugis-unstable source. The following helped me solve a similar problem:

sudo apt remove libgdal-dev
sudo apt remove libproj-dev
sudo apt remove gdal-bin
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable

Make sure a version >= 2.0 appears when you execute this line

sudo apt-cache policy libgdal-dev

If so, run

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install libgdal-dev

I could then successfully execute in R 3.4.2 in Ubuntu 14.04 ("Trusty Tahr"):

install.packages('rgdal')