How I fixed my "undefined function imagecreate()" problem:
I was having the same problem many have reported where most of PHP worked but the gd functions didn't.  I'd installed the RedHat rpm php-4.0.1pl2.  It said (phpinfo.php) that it had been configured with the '--with-gd=shared' option.  In my /usr/lib directory, I had both libgd.so.1.8.3 and libgd.a.  I decided to compile with the static library instead, so I downloaded the sources and built with all the same configuration flags except that I used --with-gd=/usr.  Now my gd library works!!!