MacNewsBlog

So theres this new Captcha plugin for Movable Type 3.3 but you need to install GD and a few other PERL modules (Authen::Captcha and GD) before you can use it. Should be an easy task but it's really not!

Before I started I did my usual "googling" for information on doing the install before I actually did it. I found a few things, but they seemed rather lengthy so I threw caution to the wind and went along my merry way attempting to install it all using CPAN. NO CAN DO. Things failed left and right when attempting to install.

I went back to google and found this helpful page:
Compiling GD on Mac OSX

Pretty good instructions and they are all step by step although, because I am on an Intel Mac Pro there were a few things I did differently.

For instance, to configure libpng, instead of following his advice to use the makefile.darwin script (which didn't work anyway) I chose to just run ./configure and let the Makefile figure things out on its own.

Also you'll want to do the following commands for installing GD after running ./configure:

rm ./libtool
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool.

then do make and make install.

Figuring it all out so that it compiled nicely took the longest! After GD was installed, installing the perl modules was pretty simple. Thank God there was documentation out there for doing this install. If not I'd have given up (and I actually was about to give up because of the constant error messages).

Sadly I couldn't get Captcha to work because the plugin stored the images in the CGI directory. The author of the plugin claims he's working on a fix though!