The following are notes for myself.

I like to use the bleeding edge version of R:

<pre class="example">svn checkout https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/ r-devel

cd r-devel ./tools/rsync-recommended

use the following to update sources: svn update

pre-reqs

sudo apt-get build-dep r-base

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ gfortran libreadline-dev libx11-dev xorg-dev

sudo apt-get install texlive texinfo

./configure make sudo make install