8.2.4 ‘could not read symbols’

An attempt to link the coNCePTuaL run-time library on one x86-64 Linux platform aborted with the following error:

/usr/lib/libpopt.so: could not read symbols: File in wrong format

An attempt on another x86-64 Linux platform aborted with a similar error:

/usr/lib/libpopt.so: could not read symbols: Invalid operation

The problem on both platforms turned out to be that the /usr/lib/libpopt.so is a 32-bit binary and could not be linked with a 64-bit library. The solution was to configure with ./configure LDFLAGS=-L/usr/lib64 to indicate that libraries should be read from /usr/lib64 instead of the default of /usr/lib64.