"Cannot allocate memory" and "non-zero exit status" - Can't install R packages on Raspberry Pi

Question

I'm having this problem while trying to install any package in my Raspberry Pi.

Some general info about the system and software:

Raspberry Pi 3
Raspbian Jessie with Pixel (Novermber 2016, latest version)
R 3.1.1

When I try install.packages("XML"), it asks me to choose a mirror, then after I choose and it download, the result is:

The dowloaded source packages are in  
'/tmp/RtmpBOxeKj/downloaded_packages'

Warning messages:
1: In system2(cmd0, args, env = env, stdout = outfile, stderr = outfile) : system call failed: Cannot allocate memory
2: In install.packages("XML") : installation of package 'XML' had non-zero exit status

This happens with any package I try to install (sometimes only the second error and sometimes both).

After booting Raspbian I have 610MB of free RAM and after opening the R console I have 582MB of free RAM, then goes down to 282MB when I try installing the package. Shouldn't that be enough?

Any idea?

Answer 1

I managed to find a solution after finding this question: stackoverflow.com/questions/7765429/…

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev

After this I was able to install the XML package. By typing apt-cache search r-cran-* it will show a list of many other R packages. I just installed all of them so that I dont need to do it again in case this problem happens again in the future, but one could only install what is needed, of course. – Bruno Caram Muller