Hello,
I start my procedure from scratch. This time I have rstudio server working fine.
One difference is how I setup libssl based on the dev 1.0 branch.
sudo apt install libssl1.0-dev
sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev
sudo apt install unixodbc-dev
sudo apt install libxml2-dev
sudo apt-get install gdebi-core
I notice two things that might or might not be different from my first run. This time I installed r-base-dev explicitly. The deb size was different, no ideas why it.
Hope this could help other with the same config and error.
jm