Drawing Maps of detailed Australian regions

...
  The  error message is that libgdal.so cannot be found - this is the
GDAL C-level binary library, whereas
/usr/local/lib/R/library/rgdal/libs/rgdal.so is the R code that
interfaces to libgdal.so.

  R tries to load rgdal.so, rgdal.so tries to load libgdal.so, can't
find it, fails.

Sadly it doesn't say where it's looking for it. Can you find
libgdal.so anywhere?

Why of course:

/home/jim/Download/FWTools-2.0.6/lib/libgdal.so
/home/jim/Download/FWTools-2.0.6/lib/libgdal.so.1
/home/jim/Download/FWTools-2.0.6/lib/libgdal.so.1.6.0
/usr/lib/libgdal.so.1
/usr/lib/libgdal.so.1.13.1
/usr/lib/ogdi/libgdal.so

So I copied the file to the same directory:

cp /home/jim/Download/FWTools-2.0.6/lib/libgdal.so 
/usr/local/lib/R/library/rgdal/libs

and then got one step further:

library(rgdal)
Error in dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...) :
   unable to load shared library 
'/usr/local/lib/R/library/rgdal/libs/rgdal.so':
   libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Error: package/namespace load failed for 'rgdal'

So I copied that file to the same directory:

cp /home/jim/Download/FWTools-2.0.6/lib/libstdc++.so.5 
/usr/local/lib/R/library/rgdal/libs

library(rgdal)
Error in dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...) :
   unable to load shared library 
'/usr/local/lib/R/library/rgdal/libs/rgdal.so':
   libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Error: package/namespace load failed for 'rgdal'

and that's where I'm stuck. I really hope that it isn't this hard for 
everyone who tries to use this package.

Jim