What package provides -llua for g++?

Question

I've installed all lua5.1 development packages from Synaptic and the g++ linker can not find -llua. I've read on some other question that it is possible that -llua has some other name and that I should fix it. But the problem is that I can't seem to find the lua.o or whatever it is called.

Solution

gcc … -llua looks for a file called liblua.so if you're linking dynamically (the default) or liblua.a if you're linking statically.

You can look for the package(s) containing a file by a certain name with apt-file . You can also make this search online on packages.ubuntu.com (“Search the contents of package”, be sure to select your distribution and architecture). But…

$ apt-file search liblua.so
$

What's going on is that Ubuntu ships multiple versions of the Lua libraries, and they aren't binary compatible, i.e. you need to select the one you want at build time.

$ apt-file --regexp search '/liblua.*\.so$'
<lots of hits>

As of natty, the preferred version of Lua is 5.1, with 5.0 and 4.0 also available. The corresponding lua libraries for linking are liblua5.1.so, liblua50.so and liblua40.so (you can list the files in a package with dpkg -L liblua5.1-0-dev or apt-file list liblua5.1-0-dev). So you need to change your linking command to -llua5.1 (or -llua50 or -llua40 if you need a binary that's compatible with older systems).