Trouble getting latest version of GDAL on ubuntu running R

My Ubuntu machine has latest GDAL (2.2.1, released 2017/06/23). But R complains that I have gdalversion <2.0

configure: CC: gcc -std=gnu99
configure: CXX: g++
checking for gdal-config... /usr/bin/gdal-config
checking gdal-config usability... yes
configure: GDAL: 1.11.3
checking GDAL version >= 2.0.0... no
configure: error: sf is not compatible with GDAL versions below 2.0.0 

How can I direct R to access GDAL (2.2.1 version) already installed on Ubuntu?

Solution 1:

You may need to uninstall all traces of gdal then re-install it from the ubuntugis-unstable source. The following helped me solve a similar problem:

sudo apt remove libgdal-dev
sudo apt remove libproj-dev
sudo apt remove gdal-bin
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable

Make sure a version >= 2.0 appears when you execute this line:

sudo apt-cache policy libgdal-dev

If so, run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libgdal-dev

I could then successfully execute in R 3.4.2 in Ubuntu 14.04 ("Trusty Tahr") this:

install.packages('rgdal')

Solution 2:

The following worked for me

sudo apt-get install gdal-bin proj-bin libgdal-dev libproj-dev

From: https://gist.github.com/dncgst/111b74066eaea87c92cdc5211949cd1e