Hi. Typically the way I run my systems is to use what is provided by whatever package manager, but if something is unavailable or outdated, I will just go ahead and build libraries and programs myself, installing them into /usr/local. The primary problem I'm having right now is getting configure scripts to see libraries which are installed in /usr/local.

In the past, while using Debian, all that was necessary was for me to install whichever library into /usr/local, and then run an ldconfig. I don't recall ever having a problem with configure detecting a library by following those simple steps.

On my current system, using SMGL (sourcemage), I simply cannot get configure scripts to detect libraries which are installed in /usr/local/lib. This has happened with a couple of different libraries and programs I've tried to install which use the standard GNU autotools system. I've tried setting CFLAGS and LDFLAGS while running configure; I've tried setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH and PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR, as well as using specific variables for a library if the configure script supports it (for example, LIBFFI_LIBS).

So essentially what is happening is I'm getting the "package not installed" messages, even though everything that a particular piece of software needs is actually in /usr/local. Any ideas on what I need to do, or what I may be doing wrong?

I realize this is a classic issue, covered countless times, but I think something else is going on here because I've been able to get around these problems in the past by running an ldconfig. For whatever reason, it's just not working for me now. Thanks.

Make sure that /usr/local/lib is listed in /etc/ld.so.conf before running ldconfig.

Thanks, jschiwal. I did have /usr/local/lib in ld.so.conf, but I think the problems I was having were related specifically to the things I was trying to build. I got around the issue by specifying other variables to point to the libraries, but I've never had to do that before - maybe something on my system is just broken. I'll go ahead and mark as solved.