The only difference is that instead of the command sudo echo 'deb xenial/' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list Since both Linux Mint and R have seen upgrades since I answered this question, I'm updating for those who come to this answer needing the info for Linux Mint 19 and R 3.6.x. Start a new R session and run the following: update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE, ask=FALSE) If not, I highly recommend you install it via sudo apt install r-base-dev.

Note also that I have put to upgrade r-base and r-base-dev, but I don't know if you have r-base-dev installed. Sudo echo 'deb xenial/' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list Open a terminal and enter the following commands 1 (replacing with whichever CRAN mirror URL you chose in step 1): sudo apt-key adv -keyserver -recv-keys E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9 The terminal commands below assume you choose Step 2 Go to CRAN's list of mirrors and find the URL of the mirror that is closest to you. So, for completeness, these are all the steps you'd need to take: Step 1 I also typically use the approach here to deal with packages I've already installed when I upgrade R rather than the approach offered by FedRo. The link provided by FedRo is a good resource, however a slight change would need to be made since you're using Linux Mint 18.1 which uses Xenial repositories rather than Trusty repositories (see here). Note: I now keep on GitHub ( here) an up-to-date guide to upgrading R on Linux Mint or Ubuntu Linux, which also includes a bit of extra information about system dependencies for tidyverse, the popular set of data-wrangling packages, as well as devtools, the popular R package development.

Update rlang package in r