Fixing GD image rotation for Drupal 6 on Ubuntu Server 8.10

On Ubuntu Server 8.10, PHP5, Drupal 6.x. If your Drupal's Status report page returns the following error:

GD Image Rotation Low Quality / Poor Performance
The installed version of PHP GD does not support ...

Here are the steps to remedy it. This will install a GD pre-compiled working version. It is a complete bundled (forked) GD libraries:

1. Adding 2 lines to your file /etc/apt/sources.lst (/etc/apt/sources.list on Debian)

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all

2. If not already done removing your current GD package and its configurations.

sudo apt-get remove php5-gd 
sudo apt-get --purge remove

3. Updating your current apt-get list

apt-get update

4. Installing working GD package.

apt-get install php5-gd

It will complain about non-authenticated sources, just ignore, it will also update some additional php libs.

When prompt select keep_current modified php.ini

5. Restarting Apache

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart