While running ./configure things may bail out with the message “cannot find the flags to link with boost thread”. This is cause by configure not being able to find the development version of the libboost-thread libraries on the current library path. If you’ve not built libboost from source, you probably need to install the -dev version of the libboost-thread package for your distribution.
For ubuntu this package is named libboost-thread-dev (you’ll find specific versions under names such as “libboost-thread1.46-dev”. Do apt-cache search libboost-thread to see which packages are available).
For Gentoo the package is named dev-libs/boost, so just emerge that one (thanks to J/#gearman).
I build boost 1.50 from scratch and installed it and I have this problem
configure: Detected BOOST_ROOT; continuing with –with-boost=/usr/local
checking for Boost headers version >= 1.35.0… /usr/local/include
checking for Boost’s header version… 1_50
checking boost/bind.hpp usability… yes
checking boost/bind.hpp presence… yes
checking for boost/bind.hpp… yes
checking for the toolset name used by Boost for g++… gcc46 -gcc
checking boost/date_time/posix_time/posix_time.hpp usability… yes
checking boost/date_time/posix_time/posix_time.hpp presence… yes
checking for boost/date_time/posix_time/posix_time.hpp… yes
checking for the Boost date_time library… yes
checking boost/function.hpp usability… yes
checking boost/function.hpp presence… yes
checking for boost/function.hpp… yes
checking boost/scoped_ptr.hpp usability… yes
checking boost/scoped_ptr.hpp presence… yes
checking for boost/scoped_ptr.hpp… yes
checking boost/shared_ptr.hpp usability… yes
checking boost/shared_ptr.hpp presence… yes
checking for boost/shared_ptr.hpp… yes
checking for the flags needed to use pthreads… -pthread
checking boost/thread.hpp usability… yes
checking boost/thread.hpp presence… yes
checking for boost/thread.hpp… yes
checking for the Boost thread library… no
configure: error: cannot find the flags to link with Boost thread
Checking the config.log file I determined I should have build boost 1.50 using
./bjam –layout=versioned install
Attempting to build 0.33 here on Debian jessie, my ./configure failed with the same error. config.log contained:
configure:21242: g++ -o conftest -pthread -L/lib64 conftest.o -lboost_thread -pthread >&5
/usr/bin/ld: conftest.o: undefined reference to symbol ‘_ZN5boost6system15system_categoryEv’
http://stackoverflow.com/a/20059671/345716 led me to:
CPPFLAGS=-lboost_system ./configure
which made ./configure work for me.