golang compiler error: can't load package: package main: no buildable Go source files in /home/ubuntu/workspace/Go

I am attempting to compile a go program. The code is a small x11 window manager, found HERE. (The code is 98 lines, too long to post here)

Here is the command I run, on x86-64 Ubuntu:

GOOS=linux GOARCH=386 go build littlewm.go

This command works fine on other files in the same directory. However, when I try to compile this one, I get the following error:

can't load package: package main: no buildable Go source files in /home/ubuntu/workspace/Go

This does not involve the gopath variable, as I have successfully compiled other programs in the same directory. I have a suspicion it involves the code itself or some option I am lacking. As such, this is not really a duplicate of an existing question and is quite possibly unique, since I am not getting the answer I want from other similar questions. Any help is appreciated greatly.

Thanks!

I encountered a similar problem when trying to build my own go program.
I had just added GCO to interface with some native C code in a library.
It built for me for the native platform (the machine I was coding on), but not when I tried to target another platform (using GOOS and GOARCH as you're doing).

Setting CGO_ENABLED to 1 (as mentioned in david's comment) fixed the problem for me:

CGO_ENABLED=1 GOOS=linux GOARCH=386 go build littlewm.go

I was using a makefile to build for multiple platforms using multiple rules, so for me, I put

export CGO_ENABLED = 1

near the top of my makefile so that I didn't need to specify it for each platform.