Comment 6 for bug 156524

On Gutsy 4.1 is the standard for gcc and g++ whereas the standard for gfortran and gij is 4.2, so the linking is probably as it should be -- except that I am not sure why the alternatives system is not used to handle the linking to versions, instead hardwired symbolic lionks are used.

The upshot appears to be then that you can't use -lgfortran without the cheat of manually linking /usr/lib/libgfortran.so unless you change the gcc link to point to gcc-4.2 instead of gcc-4.1 (but this may well break lots of other thing :-(