Configuration failed because libcurl was not found

I am trying to pull some json data from a remote server using `fromJSON`: > server <- 'http://111.111.000.00:3000' > streams <- fromJSON(paste(server, '/output/streams', sep=""), flatten=TRUE) Result: Error: Required package curl not found. Please run: install.packages('curl') So I tried to install it: > install.packages("curl") Installing package into ‘/home/lauxxx/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.3’ (as ‘lib’ is unspecified) trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/curl_2.3.tar.gz' Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 400460 bytes (391 KB) ================================================== downloaded 391 KB * installing *source* package ‘curl’ ... ** package ‘curl’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked Using PKG_CFLAGS= Using PKG_LIBS=-lcurl ------------------------- ANTICONF ERROR --------------------------- Configuration failed because libcurl was not found. Try installing: * deb: libcurl4-openssl-dev (Debian, Ubuntu, etc) * rpm: libcurl-devel (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL) * csw: libcurl_dev (Solaris) If libcurl is already installed, check that 'pkg-config' is in your PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH contains a libcurl.pc file. If pkg-config is unavailable you can set INCLUDE_DIR and LIB_DIR manually via: R CMD INSTALL --configure-vars='INCLUDE_DIR=... LIB_DIR=...' -------------------------------------------------------------------- ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘curl’ * removing ‘/home/lauxxx/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.3/curl’ Warning in install.packages : installation of package ‘curl’ had non-zero exit status The downloaded source packages are in ‘/tmp/RtmpdoavNf/downloaded_packages’ Then I tried to install `libcurl4-openssl-dev`: > install.packages("libcurl4-openssl-dev") Installing package into ‘/home/lau/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.3’ (as ‘lib’ is unspecified) Warning in install.packages : package ‘libcurl4-openssl-dev’ is not available (for R version 3.3.1) Why? What is going wrong? How can I fix it? It was ok when I was on Xubuntu 16.04. But now I am on Kubuntu 16.10. Any ideas?