Unable to install R
 

I have a relatively clean install of Precise on a VM VirtualBox and am attempting to install R and RStudio and have not had much luck. I think I have followed all the update and upgrade steps but am missing dependencies. I have added the marutter/rfdev repository apparently successfully.
Not sure where to go from here.

Can you detail what steps exactly you have taken to install it?

Have you checked the software center? I know R is showing in 14.04, under Science and Engineering section.

For my present setup, I have to run 12.10. I can see the package in the software center but it won't go into the basket for installation.

If you truly are running 12.10 that is an issue as it is dead and unsupported at this time. In the first post you said "Precise" which is 12.04 LTS which is still okay. So, are you on 12.04 or 12.10?

I appear to be on 12.10. The CRAN sources available have 'precise' as the source for R and I used that. Is this that delicate a process that there is a fatal flaw in 12.10 but not in 12.04?

12.10 is unsupported so no repositories for software. Support for 12.10 was dropped May 16, 2014 (see this link).

I would install 14.04 LTS version if I were you. As you can see from the link previously, it would be supported until April 2019. Option 2 is reinstall 12.04 which is covered until 2017. I would do option 2 if I had older hardware that is unsupported on 14.04.

I noticed you made a comment "for my present setup....". Is there a hardware issue? I see where you are running it on virtualbox, why not download and install 14.04?

Installing 12.04 did the job. That seems to be a theme with Ubuntu - delete and reinstall.

Well to be fair, 12.10 is no longer supported whereas the 12.04LTS version is until 2017.