Newer versions of R(>=3.3.x) will not build without newer bzip2, zlib, libcurl & pcre. These dependencies are not available on older version of RHEL & CentOS i.e. anything below RHEL & CentOS 7. This blog post is a step-by-step journal of what I encountered when trying to compile & install R v3.3.2 on a CentOS 6 host.