Greetings, I have libtiff and its tools installed from
distribution CDs on two systems, one a RedHat 6.2 distribution which originally came with a 2.2 Linux kernel, and another from a Slackware 10.2 distribution that came with the 2.4 kernel. As installed the tools are in /usr/bin, and work correctly with the shared libraries. The RedHat 6.2 distribution did not
include tiff2pdf so I thought I'd rebuild the library with current sources and this is where I ran into problems.

On the Red Hat system:
ldd displays the following for /usr/bin/tiffcp:
libtiff.so.3 => /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3 (0x4001a000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x40047000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40063000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
however after building and installing libtiff 3.7.0 it creates a /usr/local/bin/tiffcp which can't find tifflib.so, ldd displays:
libtiff.3 => not found
libjpeg.so.62 => /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 (0x4001b000)
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x4003a000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x40049000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40065000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
Note that it does create a link
/usr/local/lib/libtiff.3 -> /usr/local/lib/libtiff.3.7.0
I suspect configure is not setting up the shared library names correctly?
The preinstalled link (which works) is
/usr/lib/libtiff.3 -> /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3.4 as indicated above.

I built the support libraries libjpeg.so.62 and libz.so.1 on the Red Hat system with no problems indicating there is nothing very strange about its configuration, but libtiff is not working. Any thoughts?
The Makefile that configure creates has so much indirection in it that I get lost, and its pretty big, but I could post it if useful. The build.html
documentation for libtiff suggests I look for the DSO defines which control the shared library build, but I can't even find them!

While I'm on this subject, the current tifflib build tree includes a tools subdirectory. It includes all the tools as executable scripts which appear to call libtool. They execute correctly, so whatever it build is internally consistent, it just doesn't run out of /usr/local/bin.

Suggestions?

Well, have you tried finding the "missing" files?
If you're lucky, it's just a matter of copying them into the correct place.

Other than that, you really need to go into those "#define"s

Then there is the obligatory: try at least using RH9. You've done very well keeping RH6.2 going as long as you have. Though I'm guessing it dosn't look so much like the original release and more like LFS by now?