I am attempting to compile an older program on a new system. I’ve done this a few times with this same software and I have always been able to find some way to get it to work but this time I am banging my head on the wall.

When I run ./configure it stops here:

checking libtool… checking for lt_dlinit in -lltdl… no
configure: error: Cannot link with libtool libs! (libltdl)
make: *** [Makefile:209: config.status] Error 1

I made sure that libtool and libltdl are available on this system.

Then I figured that perhaps the configure script was having some problems so I ran automake which told me that the aclocal.m4 was super old so I ran aclocal, then I ran automake and it created a new configure script but the error persists.

Here are the logs from config.log

gcc: error: unrecognized command-line option ‘-V’
gcc: fatal error: no input files

gcc: error: unrecognized command-line option ‘-qversion’; did you mean ‘–version’?
gcc: fatal error: no input files

a couple of mentions of this:

conftest.c:11:10: fatal error: ac_nonexistent.h: No such file or directory
11 | #include <ac_nonexistent.h>
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Then I start seeing these:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lc
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lkstat
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lnsl
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lsocket
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

and here is where the test configure complains about fails:

onfigure:9242: gcc -o conftest -g -O2 -L conftest.c -lltdl -lrt -lpthread -lm >&5
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lltdl
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

configure:9251: result: no
configure:9261: error: Cannot link with libtool libs! (libltdl)

Does anyone have any ideas on anything else I can try to get this to compile?