@giordano I figured it out. So the problem was that I had an environment variable set in VSCode, and that was apparently throwing off Genie. So I had the following instruction for the LD_PRELOAD variable set as below,
"terminal.integrated.env.linux": {
"LD_PRELOAD" : "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so.4.6.0"
},
I believe I had set this, because when I was installing the RCall package, some of the R package installs were failing without this setting for curl.
Once I removed that setting, then the Genie install and Genie Builder install went smoothly.
Do you know what that LD_PRELOAD variable does? I did not think it would have such an unusual effect. I had to remove it to install Genie Builder, but I am not sure if the removal will affect my RCall use in the future.