Home / ubuntu / Questions / 468661
Accepted
kenn
Asked: 2014-05-19 04:25:56 +0800 CST

How to fix "PKG_PROG_PKG_CONFIG: command not found" error?

  • 772

I have Ubuntu 13.10 32 bit system. Recently when I try to to compile by running ./autogen.sh and ./configure I get 

 PKG_PROG_PKG_CONFIG: command not found

error. I have libtool installed. I have three aclocal files in usr/share/ like alocal, aclocal-1.13 and aclocal-1.4

How can I fix that alocal error?

EDIT:

Some time ago I compiled latest version of automake from source and installed it because a source code needed recent version of automake to run configure process. Since then whenever I run standard ./autogen and /configure commands in source directory to generate makefile I get 

  PKG_PROG_PKG_CONFIG: command not found

error

  find /usr -name "pkg.m4"

gives me 

  /usr/share/aclocal/pkg.m4

and

  aclocal --print-ac-dir

gives me

  /usr/local/share/aclocal
configure

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The PKG_PROG_PKG_CONFIG variable refers to a macro pkg.m4 that is provided as part of the pkg-config package, so the first thing to check is that pkg-config is installed and that the macro file is in the default location (and is readable, of course)

    dpkg -l pkg-config

ls -l /usr/share/aclocal/pkg.m4

    If that checks out, then the question becomes why is aclocal not finding it? You can check where aclocal is configured to look for third-party m4 files using the --print-ac-dir switch i.e.

    aclocal --print-ac-dir

    If that's not the same as the location above, it suggests there is a non-standard version of automake on your system - if you can't resolve that, then a possible workaround is to set or export the ACLOCAL_PATH environment variable before running the autogen.sh script e.g. 

    ACLOCAL_PATH=/usr/share/aclocal ./autogen.sh

    or 

    export ACLOCAL_PATH=/usr/share/aclocal
./autogen.sh
./configure

    See the macro search path section of the GNU automake manual.

    • 25