What the hell is libstdc++?
 

I have had soo many rpms that have failed now because they cant find libstdc++.so.6... the file is already on my computer but I tried to get the latest version anyway, and when I tried to install that it said it cant find libstdc++.so.5 (even though thats there as well)!

I've successfully installed programs from source that wont work by rpm because of this dependency, so it must be something to do with the rpm set up(?). What is this library and is there anything I can do to force the rpms into seeing it?

Why does installing programs have to be such hassle?

libstdc++ is the standard C++ libraries. Is the directory that libstdc++.so.6 and the one with libstdc++.so.5 in your /etc/ld.so.conf file?

Yep, they're in there, added them when I had another problem. Is there no environment variable that will tell rpm where to look?

Was your g++/gcc installed via rpm? RPM only knows about things it installed. In general if you are going to use a package manager at all you should use it for everything... especially things that are important dependencies to many packages (like libstdc++, which would be a dependancy for every package that contains any C++ code).

Ah, I did actually download the latest gcc and installed from source. An older version which has .so files up to .so.5 came with the distro i.e. /usr/lib/, but the .so.6 file is in /usr/local/lib, presumably from when I installed the latest gcc.

Is there no way I can tell rpm that its there? Are there any rpms for gcc (I found some but they were either old versions or for x86_64, etc)?

Cheers,

If you are told you do not have a file you actually do have during a compile you probably need the development version.