Updating Ghostscript on CentOS 5.2 (ghostscript 8.63)

PLEASE NOTE: I have posted an update for CentOS5.4 and GhostScript 8.70!

Today I needed a newer version of ghostscript on my server pool for some back-end processing we do. Updating ghostscript for RHEL5 / CentOS 5.2 turned out to be a pain! I was nearly stucked into RPM hell!

   **** Warning:  An error occurred while reading an XREF table.
   **** The file has been damaged.  This may have been caused
   **** by a problem while converting or transfering the file.
   **** Ghostscript will attempt to recover the data.
ERROR: /undefined in /BXlevel
Operand stack:
   7   0   1   --dict:6/6(ro)(G)--   obj
Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   1   3   %oparray_pop   1   3   %oparray_pop   1   3   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   %loop_continue   --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:1119/1686(ro)(G)--   --dict:0/20(G)--   --dict:107/200(L)--   --dict:107/200(L)--   --dict:104/127(ro)(G)--   --dict:241/347(ro)(G)--   --dict:18/24(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
ESP Ghostscript 815.02: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1

A few google-searches later I realized that ghostscript 8.15 is “old school” and needed a serious update. I always like to have the latest software (generally speaking) so I was after the latest version to date (version 8.63) to hopefully solve some problems with PDF translation:

First, you’ll need the jasper libraries which are not available via yum. You can get them here (i386 32bit only for now):


rpm -Uvh http://chrisschuld.com/centos52/jasper-libs-1.900.1-8.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://chrisschuld.com/centos52/jasper-1.900.1-8.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://chrisschuld.com/centos52/jasper-utils-1.900.1-8.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://chrisschuld.com/centos52/jasper-devel-1.900.1-8.i386.rpm

Next, here are the RPMs for RHEL5/CentOS5.2 for Ghostscript (i386 32bit only for now):


rpm -Uvh http://chrisschuld.com/centos52/ghostscript-8.63-1.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://chrisschuld.com/centos52/ghostscript-devel-8.63-1.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://chrisschuld.com/centos52/ghostscript-gtk-8.63-1.i386.rpm

*** Problem solved!

PLEASE NOTE: I have posted an update for CentOS5.4 and GhostScript 8.70!

16 thoughts on “Updating Ghostscript on CentOS 5.2 (ghostscript 8.63)

  1. Pingback: Building an IAXModem-based HylaFax+ server using OpenVZ | Chris Schuld's Blog

  2. Hi Chris,

    is there a possibility to get the x86_64 version of your ghostscript version? I tried to build for myself, but it failed everytime.

    Thanks.

    Marcus

  3. First, thanks for compiling this, I saved considerable time.

    Jasper is available via EPEL project repositories http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL, along with lot of other stuff.

    You might consider contributing ghostscript packages via their repository, it would be much easier for all CentOS community.

    Also, I have seen new 8.64 version is out, with some 100 bugs fixed and some improvements: http://www.ghostscript.com/GPL_Ghostscript_8.64.html. I hope you have some time to build that versions rpm’s.

  4. It would be nice to have source rpms or at least the specfiles of your rpms.
    No offense but I have an issue with just using binaries from a source which I dont trust.
    Thanks Alot

  5. Interesting, I’m in the same position. We have seen that 8.15 has issues with newer PDFs. I’ve run into a problem with your RPMs. I get complains on the ghostscript-fonts dependency:

    error: Failed dependencies:
    ghostscript-fonts is needed by ghostscript-8.63-1.i386

    The older 8.15 ghostscript-fonts from the repo doesn’t satisfy the dependency. I’m curious to know how you were able to install without fonts?

    Would you mind posting your spec files for your RPMs?

    Thanks!

  6. No need to remove ghostscript first.

    I just grabbed all the rpm’s (thanks Chris) using wget.

    put all the packages as args to rpm and it will handle the upgrade.

    rpm -Uvh ghostscript-8.63-1.i386.rpm centos52/ghostscript-devel-8.63-1.i386.rpm ghostscript-gtk-8.63-1.i386.rpm

    I presume you could skip the wget process and just give rpm a list of the http’s resources.

  7. Pingback: Updating Ghostscript on CentOS 5.4 (ghostscript 8.70) (the remix) | Chris Schuld's Blog

  8. Unable to uninstall ghostscript 8.15 failed error, pls help me

    rpm -e ghostscript error: Failed dependencies:
    libgs.so.8 is needed by (installed) ImageMagick-6.2.8.0-3.el5.4.i386
    ghostscript is needed by (installed) ghostscript-fonts-5.50-13.1.1.noarch
    ghostscript is needed by (installed) libgnomeprint22-2.12.1-9.el5.i386

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