Installing the R-package "rgeos" on linux: geos-config not found or not executable

Question

I am running R 3.4.1 on gentoo. When i try to install the 'rgeos' package, i get this:

> install.packages("rgeos")
Installing package into ‘/home/jody/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.4’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://stat.ethz.ch/CRAN/src/contrib/rgeos_0.4-2.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 255244 bytes (249 KB)
==================================================
downloaded 249 KB

* installing *source* package ‘rgeos’ ...
** package ‘rgeos’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
configure: CC: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc
configure: CXX: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-g++
configure: rgeos: 0.4-2
checking for /usr/bin/svnversion... yes
configure: svn revision: 581
checking for geos-config... no
no
configure: error: geos-config not found or not executable.
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘rgeos’
* removing ‘/home/jody/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.4/rgeos’

The downloaded source packages are in
    ‘/tmp/RtmppEeDps/downloaded_packages’
Warning message:
In install.packages("rgeos") :
  installation of package ‘rgeos’ had non-zero exit status

(The same happens if i try to install rgeos on gentoo with R 3.5.1, and also on Centos 7.5 with R 3.5.1.)

While there is a rgeos/configure which is executable in the tar file mentioned above, there is indeed no geos-config in there.

How can i get the rgeos package installed?

Is there perhaps a binary version which i could download?

Answer 1

I found the solution.

The "rgeos" package depends on libraries you have to install before running R.

In gentoo i had to do:

sudo emerge --ask sci-libs/geos

In CentOS:

sudo yum install geos geos-devel

After installing these libraries i started R and could install the 'rgeos' package without problems

Answer 2

For Ubuntu (19.10 and likely onward) use:

sudo apt install libgeos-dev