How to install older version of GhostScript?
This is second time I get segmentation fault error when I try to run GhostScript on any PDF file with pdfwrite
First time it was my previous Ubuntu 11.04 distro, which afterwards I completely remove (not because of gs), format my drive etc, and then install 11.04 again
I don't know what could be the problem. I work with GS a lot, and now all of a sudden I start getting this errors on any file, like something went wrong with this package or some of it's dependencies.
I searched Synaptic history if there maybe some recent update could cause GS crippling but there was nothing
I reported problems in the past (at least two times) on GS Launchpad branch, but no one even replied, and as a matter of fact no one ever replied to me on Launchpad for any report I issue, so I thought to remove completely ghostscript and install some other version.
At first I thought to add Debian stable repository, and install better tested version, but it turned out that perhaps that's not very good idea - adding Debian repository in Ubuntu.
As I can't "force" Synaptic to some previous GS version (as there is only one it seems - problematic one) I don't know how to approach this problem and wanted to ask how to install previous version, 8.71 preferably, because that's the last version in Debian stable.
Update:
I removed GS 9.01 (and bunch of other packages on the way) and followed Boris' advice, as I didn't know what else can I do.
I installed:
libgs8_8.71~dfsg2-9_i386.deb
ghostscript_8.71~dfsg2-9_i386.deb
and tested GS interpreter and all was working fine.
Now I wanted to put back all those packages removed by GS 9.01 removal, and I needed to first install ghostscript-x
:
ghostscript-x_8.71~dfsg2-9_i386.deb
This is where problem begins:
Error:
Breaks existing package 'gsfonts' that conflict: 'gs'.
But the '/home/zetah/gs/ghostscript-x_8.71~dfsg2-9_i386.deb' provides it via: 'gs,gs-afpl,gs-esp,gs-gpl'
I didn't want to brake things so I removed just installed libgs8
and ghostscript
and tried to remove gsfonts
package (which additionally removed abiword, gnumeric,..) and then install all again.
But I found out that gsfonts
is required by ghostscript
and installed whenever ghostscript
is installed (so ever before being able to install ghostscript-x
package).
Now after installing libgs8
and ghostscript
, when I try to install ghostscript-x
I get:
Error:
Breaks existing package 'ghostscript' that conflict: 'gs'.
But the '/home/zetah/gs/ghostscript-x_8.71~dfsg2-9_i386.deb' provides it via: 'gs,gs-afpl,gs-esp,gs-gpl'
It's exactly the same if I try with Ubuntu 10.10 ghostscript 8.71 packages from Launchpad
As an alternative solution - you could compile the older version of ghostscript.
download and extract the tar file
Download the tar file from launchpad.
setup the build environment
sudo apt-get build-dep ghostscript-x
compile and install ghostscript
cd [ghostscript folder location]
sh autogen.sh
make
sudo make install
binaries
All the binaries are installed in /usr/local/bin
Thus if you run gs -v
:
GPL Ghostscript 8.71 (2010-02-10) Copyright (C) 2010 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
If you want to run ghostscript
you can reassign the current symbolic link:
sudo rm /usr/bin/ghostscript
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/gs /usr/bin/ghostscript
Here is solution tried & tested on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS....
Download sources from http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/
wget http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/ghostscript-8.71.tar.gz
Uncompress downloaded source code & change to directory.
tar xvf ghostscript-8.71.tar.gz
cd ghostscript-8.71
Configure it (I used all defaults)
./configure
Start compilation with
make
If you encounter following error:
./base/gp_unix.c:148:2: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘gettimeofday’ [-Wimplicit-function-declaration] make: * [obj/gp_unix.o] Error 1
Compile using
make XCFLAGS=-DHAVE_SYS_TIME_H=1
Finally install compiled binaries using
make install
At this point you will ghostscript will be installed at /usr/local/bin/gs