Installing libstdc++5 on Squeeze

I was getting started with the Google Web Toolkit and the Google App Engine when I ran into a very strange problem – I got a ** Unable to load Mozilla for hosted mode ** error. Apparently the Google plugin for Eclipse is not linked to libstdc++6 but to libstdc++5 – something my ‘Squeeze’ Debian system does not have.

Some googling told me that a simple sudo apt-get install libstdc++5 should do the trick. Upon that, however, the sweet little package manager gently reminded me that Package libstdc++5 has no installation candidate. Other packages which looked like things that could possibly work gave errors like Package libstdc++5-3.3-dbg is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source rendering me a whole lot of help.

After some more hit and trial I figured out I should just download the deb package and install it using dpkg. But that did not work since the package depended on gcc-3.3-base and I had gcc-4.1-base installed. Ultimately, overcome by frustration, I extracted libstdc++5.0.7.so from the deb package to /usr/lib/libstdc++5.so. I never thought it would work. It did.