I just tried to pull in a current version of cl-cairo2 via asdf-install, and I ran into the following: There is no class named CL-CAIRO2::MY-DOUBLE-TYPE. (in cl-cairo2-swig) For me, the failing define-foreign-type expands into: (PROGN (CFFI::DEFINE-TYPE-SPEC-PARSER MY-DOUBLE-TYPE NIL (MAKE-INSTANCE 'CFFI::FOREIGN-TYPEDEF :NAME 'MY-DOUBLE-TYPE :ACTUAL-TYPE (CFFI::PARSE-TYPE (PROGN NIL (:ACTUAL-TYPE :DOUBLE) (:SIMPLE-PARSER MY-DOUBLE))))) 'MY-DOUBLE-TYPE) Note that parse-type is a function, thus (:actual-type ...) will be interpreted as a function call. This could be due a cffi mismatch: I have cffi 0.9.2 (the latest release). Do you use the one from darcs? Also, all three library names don't work in Ubuntu 8.04. I added the alternatives: cairo.lisp: (load-foreign-library '(:or "libcairo" "libcairo.so.2")) gtk-context.lisp: (define-foreign-library :gdk (cffi-features:unix (:or "libgdk-x11-2.0.so" "libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0")) (cffi-features:windows "libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dll") (cffi-features:darwin "libgdk-win32-2.0-0.dylib")) xlib.lisp: (load-foreign-library '(:or "libX11.so" "libX11.so.6")) Peter