GhostPCL - Convert from PCL to PDF

I've just spent the lions share of a day trying to get a product named GhostPCL up and running on my SuSE 10.1 system. Though this was definitely one of the more challenging installs, I'm going to need this for a client project and can see some interesting applications of this converter moving forward. Anyway, if you ever happen to find yourself in the hell of this install (as I understand that it's not easily compiled on a variety of platforms and binaries are not provided) I figured it might be beneficial to document the "magic bullet(s)".

Downloading the .tar.gz file was a snap. Extracting the files was also ridiculously simple (as all .tar.gz's tend to be). The spartan documentation then says that a person should be able to run "make" and everything will work out fine. Well, hold the phone Sparky; it ain't nearly that simple.

If you look at the README.txt file, you'll see a note about incompatabilities with the optimizer in the gcc 4.x compiler on x86_64 platforms. As my luck would have it, my compiler is in the 4.x series and this system is x86_64. As a result, the makefile for GhostPCL needed some touches.

To fix this, I went into the common directory (under the base install directory) and edited ugcc_top.mak. Locating "product:" in this file, in the subsequent make command I changed -O2 to -O. That was it for that item, so I saved it and cd'd up a directory to the base.

In the common directory (under the base directory) there is a makefile called pcl6_gcc.mak. This file has a definition for a variable XLIBDIRS that points to the 32-bit library /usr/X11R6/lib. It should point to the 64-bit library at /usr/X11R6/lib64.

With these two changes, I was able to "make" and "make install" from the base directory and now I have a working "pcl6". There were some warnings that flashed by during the compilation, but after a thousand failed attempts it did in fact install and has successfully converted a couple of samples that I've generated.