Perl GD module won't install -

Question

I\'m trying to figure out why I can\'t get the GD perl module to install on my Debian 7 server. Here is how I installed the core stuff:

Answer 1

In Ubuntu 15.04, a slight modification of the above intelligent answer seemed necessary in order to get it to install GD. This worked so that the 'cpan' program could then install GD then e.g. Image::Resize (which uses GD) afterwards. I did it after

sudo -i

in a Terminal, and after 'cd' into a temporary folder. Whether of value or not, I first did

apt-get install libgd-dev

Then this, which may contain one or more redundant lines, but it works:

wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/L/LD/LDS/GD-2.56.tar.gz
tar xvzf GD-2.56.tar.gz
cd GD*
perl -i~ -pE'say "Getopt::Long::Configure(qw( pass_through ));" if /GetOptions/;' Build.PL
/usr/bin/perl Build.PL --installdirs site
chmod 755 Build.PL
./Build.PL installdeps
./Build installdeps
./Build test
./Build install

Answer 2

The error you are getting is

Unknown option: installdirs
Usage: perl Build.PL [options]

cpan expects Build.PL to pass its arguments to Module::Build, but GD has a funky Build.PL. Let's "fix" it.

Execute the following from a temporary directory:

wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/L/LD/LDS/GD-2.56.tar.gz
  -or-
curl -L http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/L/LD/LDS/GD-2.56.tar.gz >GD-2.56.tar.gz

tar xvzf GD-2.56.tar.gz
cd GD-2.56
perl -i~ -pE'say "Getopt::Long::Configure(qw( pass_through ));" if /GetOptions/;' Build.PL
/usr/bin/perl Build.PL --installdirs site
sudo ./Build.PL installdeps
./Build.PL make
./Build.PL test
sudo ./Build.PL install