Ghostscript ImageMagick RHEL libgs.so errors

A little problem I came across today. When you install ImageMagick (IM) on RHEL (or OEL or similar), IM fails when converting pdfs. You can see the problem (libgs.so) by logging the output of IM. For example, here’s an attempted conversion of test.pdf to test.tif:

% convert -debug all -log "%u %m:%l %e" test.pdf test.tif 2>&1 | less

This gives errors like this:

0.000u module.c:1278 unable to load module `/usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.7.5/modules-Q16/coders/pdf.la': libgs.so.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So, I downloaded and unpacked a RHEL ghostscript rpm – it turns out that the rpms have symlinks to libgs.so in the package, but no libgs.so :-(

/var/tmp/usr/lib # ls -al libgs.so*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    13 Mar 28 20:41 libgs.so -> libgs.so.8.15
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    13 Mar 28 20:41 libgs.so.8 -> libgs.so.8.15

Easy you think, just install something like libgs.123.rpm, and everything will work. But there isn’t such an rpm…

So, download the ghostscript source, build it as a shared library (using the not quite obvious make so), copy the lib to /usr/lib, fix up the symlinks. Then all is  happiness and light:

% cd /var/tmp
% wget http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/ghostscript-8.71.tar.xz
% tar zxvf ghostscript-8.71.tar.xz
% cd ghostscript-8.71
% ./configure
% make so
% rm -i /usr/lib/libgs.so*
% cp sobin/libgs.so.8.71 /usr/lib
% ln -s libgs.so.8.71 libgs.so
% ln -s libgs.so.8.71 libgs.so.8

Oh the pain – why can’t the world just use The Universal Operation System – Debian?!