GD Graphics Library For Linux

GD, also known as gd-libgd or libgd, is an open source and widely used graphics library, mostly used on web servers to quickly draw images for web apps and generate the result as a JPG or PNG image file.

GD completely draws images, with arcs, multiple colors, lines, cut/paste from other images, flood fills, and plain text. Also, the library has been designed to support the GIF, XPM, WebP, and BMP image formats.

The GD Graphics Library helps web developers to easily and dynamically create images, it is written in the C programming languages, and provides wrappers for several programming languages, including PHP and Perl.

The best way to install the GD graphics library on a GNU/Linux operating system is to use the pre-built binary packages found on the main software repositories of your distribution. Simply open the default package manager, search for libgd and install the package.

If the GD library is not available on your distro or you want to install the latest version available, you can always use the source tarball distributed on Softpedia and the official website of the project,

To install libgd from sources, download the TAR archive, save it somewhere on your computer, unpack it, open a terminal emulator and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/libgd-2.1.0).

Arrived at the libgd sources’ location, you must run the ‘./configure’ command to configure and optimize the library for a specific hardware architecture (64-bit and 32-bit are supported at this time), then execute the ‘make’ command to compile it.

Lastly, install libgd system wide by running the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user. See the screenshots for details!