How to install latest Ghostscript?

[Iangh]

I want to install the latest Ghostscript from https://www.ghostscript.com/download/gsdnld.html as Discover is a bit behind. Problem is I don't know how. I've extracted it and gone to the directory and tried to use ./configure as per websites but get command not found. I'm stumped.

[claydoh]

It is not that old in 20.04 but anyway:

You have to be in the same dir as the file called 'configure', in the terminal. After extracting you do have to cd into the folder created.

You at least will need to install the package called build-essential to get started. It has important stuff like the make command.

It may a lot of work, and even more trial and error to compile this sort of thing, especially for one's first project. There may be a lot of -dev packages that need to be installed, and unless there is some general (and recent!) ubuntu specific how-to out there you will only discover these when seeing errors running configure, tracking down which package fixes the error, and then lather-rinse-repeat a very large number of times.

A shortcut that may get you at least started if you get stalled is to try to install the build-deps for the version of ghostscript already in the repos:

sudo apt build-dep ghostscript.


You will need to make sure you have all the deb-src entries in your sources.list file enabled first.

But try the ./configure and see what happens. The docs make zero mention of any dependencies you may need at all, so it may be fairly straightforward

I am not sure how well things will go with having an existing ghostscript implementation on one's system, not sure if it is a good idea to remove ot before you dive in and run the 'make install' command.
also note that removing a manually compiled thing can be troublesome. the 'make uninstall' command does not always work so cleaning up if you need to go back to stock can be....fun

[Iangh]

Yes, you're right, installed is 9.5 and this is 9.53. I'm having a problem opening pdf's in XNview and author recommended latest version. Given what you've advised I'll stay where I am. I'll let the author know I'm on 9.5 and see what he says. Ta.

[jlittle]

I often advocate here in KFN for building software, but I usually don't unless I've tried it. With https://www.ghostscript.com/download/gsdnld.html it took about 5 minutes. As claydoh said, sudo apt build-dep ghostscript is the magic command that makes it work.

./configure ... but get command not found

Did you run it in the correct directory? The instructions often say, extract to a directory, cd into it, run ./configure. But when I did it the extract was to another directory deep (of the same name), so I suspect that is what happened to you. You need to run ./configure in the directory that has the configure script, and the configure.ac file.

I also suggest that if your processor has multiple cores or threads, that you use the -j flag to make. My i7 has 4 cores and eight threads, so I run with make -j8. It goes much faster, especially on an SSD and with plenty of RAM.

Another glitch is that ghostscript installs to /usr/local/bin/gs, but does not install something called "ghostscript". So I got

$ ghostscript --version
9.50
$ gs --version
9.53.3

usr/bin/ghostscript is just a link to /usr/bin/gs, so after sudo make install, I suggest cd /usr/local/bin;sudo ln -s gs ghostscript as well.