Building R package and error "ld: cannot find -lgfortran"

Question

I'm trying to install the package lars. Ubuntu 11.04 Natty 64-bit. From building I get:

* installing *source* package âlarsâ ...
** libs
gfortran   -fpic  -O3 -pipe  -g -c delcol.f -o delcol.o
gcc -shared -o lars.so delcol.o -lgfortran -lm -L/usr/lib64/R/lib -lR
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lgfortran
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [lars.so] Error 1
ERROR: compilation failed for package âlarsâ

gfortran is installed and when I run gfortran --version I get

gfortran --version GNU Fortran (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.5.2-8ubuntu4) 4.5.2

sudo ldconfig -v gives the error

/sbin/ldconfig.real: Cannot stat /usr/lib/libgfortran.so: No such file or directory

I have already removed and reinstalled gfortran. What do I need to fix this?

Answer 1

I had the same problem when trying to install the CRAN package VGAM on Ubuntu 12.10 64bit. I already had r-base-dev installed, but Andrew Redd's second comment to Dirk Eddelbuettel's answer worked for me.

Specifically, I was getting two errors:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lgfortran
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lquadmath

Which were fixed by the lines:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgfortran.so.3 /usr/lib/libgfortran.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libquadmath.so.0 /usr/lib/libquadmath.so

Note that only the first line would be necessary to take care of the problem from the original post. The second line fixed of my additional error with lquadmath.