Would you like to enable Bitcoin Core wallet during configuration? “Method not found” occurs

Problem: When I run it, I get the message “Method not found”. bitcoin-cli getwalletinfo If you do a fresh install.

I compiled and installed Bitcoin Core 26.0 from source on my Ubuntu system following standard methods.

./autogen.sh
./configure
make 
make install 

I had to install a few missing modules (including gcc), but once that was done, everything seemed to work correctly and bitcoind is now happily downloading the blockchain. No additional commands were specified in the configuration script. But when I run bitcoin-cli getwalletinfo I get the message ‘Method not found’.

if i run bitcoin-cli help |grep -i wallet This will return no results.

I checked and the deactivate wallet line in bitcoin.conf is commented out. I flipped it to 0 just in case, but it made no difference.

If you look at the config.log in the build directory, you will see this:

configure:34644: checking whether to build bitcoin-wallet
configure:34654: result: yes
...
configure:34826: checking if wallet should be enabled
configure:34837: result: no

Is this causing the problem? So how do you fix it? Or if not, what else should I look for?