Installing Apache2::Request on a 64-bit system

I usually shy away from using 64-bit systems unless there is a clear need for it.  But with more and more hosting companies installing 64-but Linux distrobutions by default I sometimes have to suffer through.

Today I ran into a very small bug in installing Apache2::Request modules via the CPAN shell.  This simply installs the default libapreq2 library with the Perl bindings for you. When attempting to start Apache I received this error:

Can't load '/usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/auto/APR/Request/Request.so' for module APR::Request: libapreq2.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at /usr/lib64/perl5/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 230. at /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/APR/Request/Param.pm line 27 Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/APR/Request/Param.pm line 27. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/APR/Request/Param.pm line 27. Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/Apache2/Request.pm line 2. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/Apache2/Request.pm line 2.

Basically it is saying it can't load libapreq2.so.2.  Digging around in the system I found it had installed them in /usr/lib instead of the proper /usr/lib64.  The actual shared library was compiled for 64-bit, but was just installed in the wrong location.  A quick symlink like this fixes the isuse:

ln -s /usr/lib/libapreq2.so.2 /usr/lib64/libapreq2.so.2

Hope this helps you get over this small issue.

Comments

[Fred Moyer]

I think that you can also solve this issue by adding /usr/lib64 to /etc/ld.so.conf, and then running ldconfig. I've done a lot of head banging with the 64 bit implementations, it can be frustrating at times, but oh are the machines fast!