I got it to work finally. I ended up going back to stepwise and redoing everything there. (except gd 1.8.6) Then I installed gd with the flags that you suggested (I also had to redo runlib on libgd.a).
I believe the trick is that the PHP ./configure has to read:
checking whether to enable FTP support... yes
checking whether to include GD support... yes
checking whether to enable truetype string function in gd... no
checking for the location of libjpeg... yes
checking for jpeg_read_header in -ljpeg... (cached) yes
checking for the location of libpng... yes
checking for png_info_init in -lpng... yes
checking for the location of libXpm... no
If configure fails try --with-xpm-dir=<DIR>
checking for freetype(2)... no
If configure fails try --with-freetype-dir=<DIR>
checking whether to include include FreeType 1.x support... no
checking whether to include T1lib support... no
checking for gdImageString16 in -lgd... (cached) yes
checking for gdImagePaletteCopy in -lgd... (cached) yes
checking for gdImageCreateFromPng in -lgd... (cached) no
checking for gdImageCreateFromGif in -lgd... (cached) no
checking for gdImageWBMP in -lgd... (cached) yes
checking for gdImageCreateFromJpeg in -lgd... (cached) yes
checking for gdImageCreateFromXpm in -lgd... (cached) yes
checking for gdImageCreateTrueColor in -lgd... (cached) yes
checking for gdImageSetTile in -lgd... (cached) yes
checking for gdImageSetBrush in -lgd... (cached) yes
checking for gdImageStringFTEx in -lgd... (cached) no
checking for gdImageColorClosestHWB in -lgd... (cached) yes
checking for gdImageColorResolve in -lgd... (cached) yes
checking for gdImageGifCtx in -lgd... (cached) no
somwhere in there. Anyway , thx very much for all of the help, it is working now. If you want to see what I have done head to
http://144.92.33.99/search and search for a plant. All of the resulting thumbnails were generated by the script
. You are searching from a script generated MySQL database of approx 10,000 images (3 collections and there may be duplicates between them)