Installing caret for R. nlopt linux install error - r

Question

I am new to linux and struggling with installing caret for R. I am receiving the following error during the caret install process.
configure: Need to download and build NLopt
trying URL 'http://ab-initio.mit.edu/nlopt/nlopt-2.4.2.tar.gz'
Error in download.file(url = "http://ab-initio.mit.edu/nlopt/nlopt-2.4.2.tar.gz", :
cannot open URL 'http://ab-initio.mit.edu/nlopt/nlopt-2.4.2.tar.gz'
Execution halted
/bin/gtar: This does not look like a tar archive
gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
/bin/gtar: Child returned status 1
/bin/gtar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
Warning message:
In untar(tarfile = "nlopt-2.4.2.tar.gz") :
'/bin/gtar -xf 'nlopt-2.4.2.tar.gz'' returned error code 2
configure: Starting to install library to /tmp/RtmpIT5jNR/R.INSTALL17d113d7c2a/nloptr/nlopt-2.4.2
./configure: line 3325: cd: nlopt-2.4.2: No such file or directory
It stops after this, floating and then I have to crash R to fix it. I have scoured through the nlopt site and based on the error have attempted to install into R manually. I have the actual tar file and I have placed it into Rstudios package file, then gone through the process of installing it. However, this does not seem to work at all. I am guessing there is something specific to R that needs to be done to complete the install?
Note I have tried installing just the nlopt via install.packages and the same error occurs. Any ideas?
Edit 1:
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.2.2 (2015-08-14)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: CentOS release 6.9 (Final)
locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
[3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
[5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
attached base packages:
[1] grid stats graphics grDevices utils datasets
[7] methods base
other attached packages:
[1] nnet_7.3-11 Hmisc_3.17-0 Formula_1.2-1
[4] survival_2.38-3 lattice_0.20-33 readxl_0.1.0
[7] reshape2_1.4.1 ggplot2_1.0.1 dplyr_0.4.3
[10] data.table_1.9.6
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] Rcpp_0.12.2 cluster_2.0.3 magrittr_1.5
[4] splines_3.2.2 MASS_7.3-43 munsell_0.4.2
[7] colorspace_1.2-6 R6_2.1.1 stringr_1.0.0
[10] plyr_1.8.3 tools_3.2.2 parallel_3.2.2
[13] gtable_0.1.2 latticeExtra_0.6-26 DBI_0.3.1
[16] lazyeval_0.1.10 assertthat_0.1 digest_0.6.8
[19] gridExtra_2.0.0 RColorBrewer_1.1-2 acepack_1.3-3.3
[22] rpart_4.1-10 stringi_1.0-1 RevoUtils_8.0.0
[25] scales_0.3.0 foreign_0.8-65 chron_2.3-47
[28] proto_0.3-10
I reconogize I am not using the most recent version of R and unfortunitly will not be able to upgrade. However, Caret package information claims it should work on anything greater than R(>=2.1), lattice(>=0.2) and ggplot2. All of which criteria is met.