How to solve the error " missing required header GL/gl.h" while installing the Package mvoutlier in R?

I suspect you are running Ubuntu 12.04.I think you're going to find that this works for the GL/gl.h problem:

install these at the regular old terminal, ie pretend R doesn't exist for now:

libglu1-mesa-dev freeglut3-dev mesa-common-dev

You might get the following error later (in R) because of a tcl b****/gripe/complaint:

Error in structure(.External(.C_dotTcl, ...), class = "tclObj") : 
  [tcl] can't find package BWidget.

To fix this problem, if you have it:

sudo apt-get install bwidget

These are not R problems. They are OS problems!

I ran into the same issue in between others on a Ubuntu based Linux distro (Linux Mint). Here I will share the worklog I'd done to fix it.

The full fix was:

apt-get install libx11-dev mesa-common-dev libglu1-mesa-dev

Worklog

The first error was related to missing devel libraries of X11:

configure: error: X11 not found but required, configure aborted.

I fixed it installing:

apt-get install libx11-dev

However, after fix the issue, I felt into a new one like this one:

configure: error: missing required header GL/gl.h ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘rgl’

I checked the library on the repository:

# dpkg -S /usr/include/GL/gl.h dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern /usr/include/GL/gl.h

To fix this issue, install :

apt-get install mesa-common-dev

Then, I was prompt by a new error:

configure: error: missing required header GL/glu.h

To fix the issue, install the libglu1 devel libraries:

apt-get install libglu1-mesa-dev

configure: error: missing required header GL/gl.h 

normally means you haven't installed the -dev version of a package, in this case GL.

On my system, GL/gl.h is owned by mesa-common-dev

$ dpkg -S /usr/include/GL/gl.h
mesa-common-dev: /usr/include/GL/gl.h

which would have been installed with apt-get install mesa-common-dev or via some GUI magic.