Installing perl GD

I never thought I will get stuck installing perl GD module so badly. I use GD::Graph module from bioperl for most of my plotting work. Our old servers had all of these installed over a period of time. Now I am in a hurry to plot something, but could not get this thing working. It keeps complaining about libgd-config file. You google but you will never find a proper answer. I went down my own memory lane and remembered about the gd module. Also looking up in the error profile, you will locate somewhere it is asking you to install libgd 2.0.8 or higher.

Finally I located the module at https://bitbucket.org/libgd/gd-libgd/downloads/libgd-2.1.0.tar.gz  and looked for manual at  http://www.boutell.com/gd/manual2.0.28.html at http://www.boutell.com/gd/http/gd-2.0.28.tar.gz . Unpacked and did a ./configure followed by a make and it just exited with errors...
Tracing back into ./configure log again, I figured out, it wanted zlib library.
The zlib package can be found in this site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libpng/files/zlib/1.2.7/zlib-1.2.7.tar.gz/download?use_mirror=nchc&download=

Once downloaded it, it complains about libpng package.

Get libpng package from http://sourceforge.net/projects/libpng/files/latest/download?source=files
do  ./configure followed by make install.
Then go back and install zlib then install gd package.

then go back and do a perl -MCPAN -e "install GD"

But my script did not run even then. It asked about GD::Graph. So, do a
perl -MCPAN -e "install GD"