failed installation of openssl in R SUSE

Question

I am a newcomer and currently trying to install openssl package in R (I have a SUSE Linux Enterprise server SP3 distribution), but it fails. The error message is this:

During startup - Warning message:  
Setting LC_CTYPE failed, using "C"   
* installing *source* package 'openssl' ...  
** package 'openssl' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked  
Using PKG_CFLAGS=  
Using PKG_LIBS=-lssl -lcrypto  
------------------------- ANTICONF ERROR ---------------------------  
Configuration failed because openssl was not found. Try installing:    
* deb: libssl-dev (Debian, Ubuntu, etc)  
* rpm: openssl-devel (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL)  
* csw: libssl_dev (Solaris)  
* brew: openssl (Mac OSX)  
If openssl is already installed, check that 'pkg-config' is in your  
PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH contains a openssl.pc file. If pig-config  
is unavailable you can set INCLUDE_DIR and LIB_DIR manually via:  
R CMD INSTALL --configure-vars='INCLUDE_DIR=... LIB_DIR=...'  
--------------------------------------------------------------------  
ERROR: configuration failed for package 'openssl'  

I made sure to have installed openssl in SUSE:

OpenSSL 0.9.8j-fips 07 Jan 2009
built on: Mon May  2 15:55:35 UTC 2016
platform: linux-x86_64
options:  bn(64,64) md2(int) rc4(16x,int) des(idx,cisc,4,long) blowfish(ptr2) 
compiler: gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DZLIB -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -   
DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DL_ENDIAN -DMD32_REG_T=int -fmessage-length=0 -O2  
-Wall -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fstack-protector -funwind-tables -fasynchronous-  
unwind-tables -g -fomit-frame-pointer -fno-strict-aliasing -DTERMIO -DPURIFY - 
Wall -fstack-protector -Wa,--noexecstack -fprofile-use  -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT  
- DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DMD5_ASM -DAES_ASM
OPENSSLDIR: "/etc/ssl"  

And the openssl.pc file is located here:

/home/oscar/anaconda_ete/pkgs/openssl-1.0.2g-0/lib/pkgconfig/openssl.pc
/home/oscar/anaconda_ete/lib/pkgconfig/openssl.pc
/etc/ssl/openssl.pc
/usr/lib64/pkgconfig/openssl.pc

I would be very grateful with any help you could provide. I have been stuck for days trying to solve this problem without any success. Thanks a lot.
PS: I am installing this packages (openssl) because it is required by another R package (BioGeoBEARS).

Answer 1

You can't install a newer version than 0.9.8 on SLES 11 because the next openssl version is incompatible with itself. https://www.suse.com/communities/blog/tls-1-2/ https://www.openssl.org/news/changelog.html#x37

But there is a possibility to build and install openssl 1.0.2 on SLES11 in an additional folder and point the r-openssl package to it.

Download and extract openssl src tarball

cd ~ curl https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.1.0f.tar.gz | tar zxv

Create a new directory for the additional openssl version eg

sudo mkdir -p /opt/R/extra/openssl

build and install openssl 1.1.0 with prefix

cd openssl-1.1.0f ./configure --prefix=/opt/R/extra/openssl make sudo make install

install r-package openssl (0.9.7)

cd ~ R CMD INSTALL --configure-vars='INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/R/extra/openssl/include LIB_DIR=/opt/R/extra/openssl/lib' openssl_0.9.7.tar.gz