As explained in a previous note, a few weeks ago I was not able to install rgeos version 0.4-1. I ran into a new issue today and I decided to figure out what was wrong with it. After a quick search, I found this answer on and it turned out that all I needed was to install libgeos++-dev and so I did:

sudo apt install libgeos++-dev

After that the command:

Rscript -e "install.packages('rgeos')"

worked like a charm! I guess this is mentioned somewhere in the doc, I obviously missed something (as far as I understand, libgeos++-dev was not required before version v0.4-x, only libgeos-dev). Anyway, once again, thanks to the users!