Compiling problems: cannot find crt1.o

Question

Debian / Ubuntu

The problem is you likely only have the gcc for your current architecture and that's 64bit. You need the 32bit support files. For that, you need to install them

sudo apt install gcc-multilib

What helped me is to create a symbolic link:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu /usr/lib64

It seems that while you were playing with llvm/clang you(or the package manager) removed previously existing standard C library development package(eglibc on Debian) or maybe you didn't have it installed in the first place, thus you need to reinstall it, now that you reverted back to gcc.

You can do so like this on Debian:

aptitude show libc-dev

Ubuntu:

apt-get install libc-dev

On Ubuntu, if you don't have libc-dev, since I cannot find it on packages.ubuntu.com, you can try installing libc6-dev directly.

Or on Redhat like systems:

yum install glibc-devel

NB: Although you were briefly answered in the comments, here is an answer just so there is one on record in case someone encounters this one and might be looking for an answer, but not in the comments or the comment is not explicit enough for them.

This is a BUG reported in launchpad, but there is a workaround :

Run this to see where these files are located

$ find /usr/ -name crti*
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/crti.o

then add this path to LIBRARY_PATH variable

$ export LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu:$LIBRARY_PATH