Hello all,
This happens a lot. It would be good to be able to put something into the optionlist which told the MPI thorn that it should use an auto-detected library, rather than building the library.
Most thorns support a XXX_DIR=NO_BUILD option which then (depends on the thorn) may require you to actually specify the location of the libraries or may still allow searching for it. Basically all auto-detection (with the exception of MPI which also seems to fail here) should fail on modern Debian/Ubuntu systems that support "multi-arch" installations since the libraries are no longer in /usr/lib but in /usr/lib/x86-amd64 or so. Bruno was working on fixing this before the last release but the results were too fragile to be included in the current release branch.
Yours, Roland