Hello Exception,
Welcome to the forum.
It often happens to me. After installed 'bad' packages, my Lazarus refused to rebuild even I reinstalled the IDE. It just says "Error while linking". My solution is easy, perhaps it works on your case too.
Open your file manager > enable to show hidden files > browse to /home/[user]/.lazarus > delete package.xml > start the Lazarus IDE > rebuild
If it doesn't work, you may need to delete all the files there. Make sure you already backup the files. The trick never fails on my Ubuntu Mate computer.
Hello and thank you.
I think that worked. The file I found in the directory was packagefiles.xml, which I renamed to something random, and I restarted Laz, then everything seemed to break, which gave me quite a "oh c**p!" moment
, but the standard component library was still working, and I just reinstalled some component libraries, and everything got working again...until I tried reinstalling one component library...
I've discovered that "bglcontrols" seems to be the culprit, which is in the BGRABitmap-Master directory, and part of BGRABitmap , not PowerPDF. Strangely BGRAControls (which I'm a fan of), which I thought needed BGRABitmap, seems to be working fine without bglcontrols and BGRABitmap (BGRAGames also doesn't install). Why it suddenly decided to go wrong when I've had BGRAControls, and possibly bglcontrols installed for months, I'm not sure. But still no real explanation of why bgacontrols now causes Laz to stop linking.
@marcov. Thanks, I tried the that option for the message window, but it didn't give me anything new as to why linking was failing, sadly. Maybe it's some kind of version clash, as the version of BGRAControls I have installed is older to the one in the repository.
Thanks also to @MarkMLl
Anyway, I have a fully working Lazarus and can install (most at least) components again! Yay!
I think my component library's probably still in a bit of mess, though, and maybe I should use this as excuse have a clear out and install .12.
Thanks for the replies, guys, apologies for not getting back earlier.