While building MythTV svn trunk in Debian unstable, I stumbled across this error message:
“/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lGL”
$ ls -l /usr/lib | grep GL showed that indeed, libGL.so was not present. I was a little confused as I had libgl1-mesa-dev installed. Over to the Debian package website I went to check which packages have libGL.so and I noted nvidia-glx-dev. If you have an NVIDIA card and need libGL.so in Debian, don’t forget to install nvidia-glx-dev. 