configure: error: You need to install g++

Posted September 1st, 2012 in Linux/Unix/BSD

While setting up mono/fastcgi for a customer on their RHEL 6 server at AWS, I got the error "configure: error: You need to install g++" when trying to configure mono. I'd already installed gcc and there didn't appear to be a g++ to install. This post shows the error and the simple solution.

The problem

I'd already installed gcc first and then ran the configure command only to be told I needed to install g++ as shown below:

$ ./configure
checking build system type... x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
... lots of output ...
configure: error: You need to install g++

The solution

I tried installing g++ with "yum install g++" and search for it using "yum search g++" but nothing was found. It turns out you need to install gcc-c++ which installs g++ as part of the package, like so:

$ yum install gcc-c++

Now configure will work.

Linux distros

This should work for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 6 and CentOS 6, and possibly earlier versions of these Linux distros as well. I ran these commands on RHEL6.