R Package installation fails with "libopenblas.so.3: cannot open shared object file"

Recently, I had trouble updating some R packages that require openblas. The error R gives is*: “libopenblas.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”. It seems some other people experience the same problem. With a symlink we can fix the problem quickly.

First, we check if any libopenblas.so is on our filesystem:¹

locate libopenblas.so

## /usr/lib/libopenblas.so
## /usr/lib/libopenblas.so.0
## /usr/lib/libopenblas.so.0.3
## /usr/lib/libopenblas.so.3

Here, we can already see the problem. There is no file libopenblas.so.3, but only libopenblas.so.0.3. Let us simply make a symlink from 0.3 to 3:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libopenblas.so.0.3 /usr/lib/libopenblas.so.3

That is it, now package installation should work again.