Ubuntu Qt 5.5.1: error Cannot find -lGL

Question

I have developed an GUI application on Qt 5.3.1. I am using Qt Creator 3.1.2 (based on Qt 5.3.1) to build my GUI application and am able to build and deploy my application successfully.

I wanted to update my qt creator and for that I have installed the latest Qt Creator 3.5.1 (based on Qt 5.5.1) and provided necessary changes to build my existing QT GUI application on this latest qt creator. Everything went well and just about to create the final executable, the build was terminated with below error information:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lGL
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
The process "/usr/bin/make" exited with code 2.
Error while building/deploying project test-app (kit: Desktop Qt 5.5.1 GCC 32bit)

I tried to search online and found this suggestion to update the Mesa package!. [If that is the case, why is that the same application was building fine on my Qt creator 3.1.2. I want to know some details before trying the fix blindly.]

My Qt Creator runs on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Can somebody provide me some pointers to fix this issue? Thanks in advance.

Solution

I ended up fixing this as per the recommendations I read online: that is to update the Mesa Package.

 sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dev