ATLAS threaded 64 bit (Opteron) - need *.so?

Using ATLAS with R is an old topic quite covered in the "R
Administration" manual (and by R's "configure" script
collection).

I still do not easily manage to build R properly on our new AMD
Opteron (2-processor).
I did work with the current Atlas 3.6.0, configured manually
(but "express" version) to build a threaded ATLAS version, and
successfully ran Atlas' own   "make ptsanity_test arch=Linux_HAMMER64SSE2_2"  
sanity check as well.

As it is known, this builds only static (*.a) versions of the
ATLAS libraries.  However, after an R site search for (something
like) "ATLAS shared", I found Peter Dalgaard's message
        http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02/archive/7158.html
where PD confirmed it would work fine to link against the static
ATLAS libraries.
I didn't need (his suggestion of) using an explicit "-L..atlas_place...", 
since these libraries are symbolically linked into
/usr/local/lib/ which is searched by default.

Now, R's configure (R-devel of 2004-02-24) 
finds the ATLAS setup well behaved, reporting

  R is now configured for x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

    Source directory:          ../R-devel
    Installation directory:    /usr/local

    C compiler:                gcc  -g -O2 -Wall -Wno-comment
    C++ compiler:              g++  -g -O2
    Fortran compiler:          g77  -g -O2 -Wall -fno-f90 

    Interfaces supported:      X11
    External libraries:        readline, BLAS(ATLAS)

                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^

and compilation (of course) goes fine till the crucial linking
stage :

gcc -shared   -o libRlapack.so dlapack0.lo dlapack1.lo dlapack2.lo dlapack3.lo cmplx.lo  -lf77blas -latlas -L/usr/lib64 -L/usr/lib/gcc-lib/x86_64-redhat-linux/3.2.3 -L/usr/lib/gcc-lib/x86_64-redhat-linux/3.2.3/../../../../lib64 -L/usr/lib/gcc-lib/x86_64-redhat-linux/3.2.3/../../.. -L/lib/../lib64 -L/usr/lib/../lib64 -lfrtbegin -lg2c -lm -lgcc_s
/usr/bin/ld: /usr/local/lib/libf77blas.a(xerbla.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
/usr/local/lib/libf77blas.a: could not read symbols: Bad value
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

and I'm stuck to some extent.
Note that the "recompile with -fPIC"  must related to the
contents of ATLAS' libf77blas.a itself (or to "xerbla.o" more
concretely), since all of R's  dlapack[0-3].lo are of course
compile with -fPIC.

I tend to conclude that I do need shared versions of ATLAS'
libraries?  If yes, I think I've seen instructions on how to
build these.  Where?
If these are really needed, I think I should add them to the
corresponding "R administration manual" section, right?

Thanks in advance for your share of experience here.
Martin