Help with cross-compiling for ARM

Question

I have recently been trying to cross-compile programs for ARM. However, when I run make, I always get an error within a minute or less that says something like

/usr/lib/gcc-cross/arm-linux-gnueabihf/4.8/../../../../arm-linux-gnueabihf/bin/ld: cannot find -lgio-2.0.

The thing that confuses me is that I get that error every time I try to cross-compile a program (except it doesn't always say that it can't find -lgio-2.0. It has trouble finding other things too). Is there something I'm doing wrong? Why is it always this error? The only program I have been able to successfully cross-compile is bash, but I've had problems with everything else. What do I do? I have all of the libraries and things installed, as I am able to natively compile the programs just fine.

Solution

As mentioned by muru. You need to install the ARM architecture of that library. However they are not listed on http://packages.ubuntu.com site. Neither, it's easy to manage dependencies manually that way.

Note: Setup a chroot environment, I found weird behavior when I added armhf architecture to my Ubuntu 15.04 amd64. I used dpkg --add-architecture=armhf. The APT start complaining about broken package wine and tried to remove all i386 packages.

1. Add new sources file

   sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/arm-repo.list
   

   Add the source of the architecture you want and release you have.

   deb [arch=armhf] http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports trusty main universe
   

   Check for available arch here: http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/trusty/main/ as you can browse up/down for different releases.

2. Update package list

   sudo apt-get update
   

3. Add a dpkg configuration

   sudo nano /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch
   

   with this line

   foreign-architecture armhf
   

4. Install need packages as needed, example:

   sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-0:armhf
   

References:

• Getting Started with MultiArch (armel / armhf) in Ubuntu
• Linaro: Cross building Quick Start

Comments

[Eliah Kagan]

Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! Can you edit this with more information on how to do that?

[Aenfa]

Doesn't work with Ubuntu 18.04 (and later). I get dpkg: error: configuration error: /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch:1: unknown option 'foreign-architecture' and libglib2.0-0:armhf : Depends: libc6:armhf (>= 2.28) but it is not going to be installed,... etc.