I'm sorry you had so much difficulty getting R to install on Red Hat
Linux 7.0. The moral of this story is that you should keep your box up
to date with the latest official updates from Red Hat. Specifically
- To run R, you should upgrade glibc. The version that comes "out
of the box" on RH7.0 is a pre-release version of glibc 2.2 and is
buggy.
- To build R yourself, you should upgrade gcc. The version that comes
with RH7.0 is contains two bugs that prevent R from working correctly.
These are detailed at
ftp://calvin.iarc.fr/pub/R/RedHat/7.x/i386/DIY/ReadMe
gcc-2.96-65 and above contains patches for these bugs.