Installing ghc binaries on Linux (can't find libgmp.so)

Question

I am trying to install the Haskell Platform on Linux for the first time (I'm also a fairly new Linux user). The victim system is a fresh Red Hat system. And everything involved here should be 64 bit.

The directions at the platform website [1] indicate that I need a ghc7.0.3 to boostrap things. They provide a link to a generic binary of ghc-7.0.3 to do this. I fetched this and ran

$ ./configure ... $ make install ... 

as per the directions without incident (it is a binary, so no compilation needed) However, when I tried to run ghci I get the output.

$ ghci GHCi, version 7.0.3: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done. Loading package integer-gmp ... <command line>: can't load .so/.DLL for: gmp (libgmp.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory) 

For some reason ghci cannot find libgmp.so. Running ghci ultimately invokes

  /usr/local/lib/ghc-7.0.3/ghc 

with a mess of options. I checked the dependencies via ldd

$ ldd /usr/local/lib/ghc-7.0.3/ghc     linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007fffe5f5c000)     libncursesw.so.5 => /lib64/libncursesw.so.5 (0x0000003ee7000000)     librt.so.1 => /lib64/librt.so.1 (0x0000003ee5800000)     libutil.so.1 => /lib64/libutil.so.1 (0x0000003ef3000000)     libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x0000003ee5000000)     libgmp.so.3 => /usr/lib64/libgmp.so.3 (0x0000003ee4400000)     libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x0000003ee4c00000)     libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (0x0000003ee5400000)     libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x0000003ee4800000)     libtinfo.so.5 => /lib64/libtinfo.so.5 (0x0000003ef3400000)     /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000003ee4000000) 

and it shows that it foud libgmp. libgmp is in /usr/local/lib and /usr/local/lib64. I am not sure how to get further with this. Any suggestions?

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/linux.html

Answer 1

You either add /usr/local/lib and/or /usr/local/lib64 to $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, or add them to /etc/ld.so.conf, or (since you already have /usr/lib64/libgmp.so.3) add a missing symbolic link:

cd /usr/lib64 sudo ln -s libgmp.so.3 libgmp.so 

(and perhaps the same for /usr/lib).

Note that /usr/lib64/libgmp.so.3 might be a different version from /usr/local/lib64/libgmp.so, make sure ghc can actually be used with the former.