An error when install perl module: GD

Background

Circos is a very useful data visualization tool for genome or other genetic data. However, installing circos process is not easy for a bioinofmatics beginner or person without much coding knowledge. Circos depends many perl modules, like:

• Carp
• Clone
• Config::General
• Cwd
• Data::Dumper
• Digest::MD5
• File::Basename
• File::Spec::Functions
• File::Temp
• FindBin
• Font::TTF::Font
• GD
• GD::Polyline
• Getopt::Long
• IO::File
• List::MoreUtils
• List::Util
• Math::Bezier
• Math::BigFloat
• Math::Round
• Math::VecStat
• Memoize
• POSIX
• Params::Validate
• Pod::Usage
• Readonly
• Regexp::Common
• SVG
• Set::IntSpan
• Statistics::Basic
• Storable
• Sys::Hostname
• Text::Balanced
• Text::Format
• Time::HiRes

P.S. recommend to install Params::Validate last one.

Error

fortunately, most of above can be install by cpan, but GD failed lots of time. everytime error like this:

Package gdlib was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gdlib.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'gdlib' found

Solve

because GD module depends libgd, libgd is an open source code library for the dynamic creation of images by programmers. you must install it first.
see more: libgd

wget https://github.com/libgd/libgd/releases/download/gd-2.2.5/libgd-2.2.5.tar.gz
tar zxvf libgd-2.2.5.tar.gz
cd libgd-2.2.5
./configure 
make
make install
make installcheck

if you are not root, or you just want install for yourself, you need install add -prefix=

./configure -prefix=/home/yourname/local
make
make install
make installcheck

then, you can use cpan to insall GD module.