I was getting an error checking packages in R on an Ubuntu 10.10 machine using the ‘R CMD check’ command saying:
LaTeX errors when creating PDF version. This typically indicates Rd problems.
I have no idea what R’s problem with pdflatex was (I’ve been using pdflatex for writing papers just fine) but once I installed the texlive-full package (a metapackage that installed all sorts of other packages) the check ran without any errors. If in doubt, this package seems to install everything that might be missing (along with the kitchen sink).
Palaeontology 2.0 
Hi. Thanks for this post– it helped me to discover that I was missing a texlive package when I encountered the same problem. For what it’s worth, it’s probably not necessary to install texlive-full, which is over 1GB. It’s (at least one of) the following packages:
Installed the following packages:
debiandoc-sgml (1.2.15)
libroman-perl (1.23-1)
libsgmls-perl (1.03ii-32)
libsp1c2 (1.3.4-1.2.1-47build3)
libtext-format-perl (0.52-21)
sgmlspl (1.03ii-32)
sp (1.3.4-1.2.1-47build3)
texinfo (4.13a.dfsg.1-6ubuntu3)
texlive-formats-extra (2009-10ubuntu1)
texlive-generic-extra (2009-10ubuntu1)
texlive-lang-other (2009-3)
texlive-plain-extra (2009-10ubuntu1)
texlive-xetex (2009-11)
Cheers.
Cheers for the information. I had a similar problem with R on a Fedora 15 distribution and this pointed me in the right direction.
The culprit in this case was the texinfo-tex (4.13a-15.fc15) package.
Thanks! Same here, the problem was solved by installing texinfo.