Steven .. Here is the list of commands to install tesseract 3.05 on Redhat 6 ... Hope this should work for Redhat 5 ... if not please try to downgrade the tesseract and try ..
sudo yum update
sudo yum install wget unzip
sudo yum install gcc gcc-c++ make
sudo yum install libjpeg-devel libpng-devel libtiff-devel zlib-devel
sudo yum install libtool
sudo yum install autoconf automake
sudo yum whatprovides libtool
(Install the latest version)
sudo yum whatprovides libtiff
Download it manually and copy it into the ec2 instance.
sudo rpm -ivh autoconf-archive-2012.04.07-7.3.noarch.rpm
Installing leptonica:
tar xvf leptonica-1.74.1.tar.gz
cd leptonica-1.74.1
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
Installing Tesseract:
cd ..
unzip master.zip
cd tesseract-master/
sudo ./autogen.sh
export LIBLEPT_HEADERSDIR=/usr/local/include
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
./configure --with-extra-includes=/usr/local/include --with-extra-libraries=/usr/local/lib
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
loading the training data for tesseract:
Dowload the tessdata and copy only the contents into the tesseract-master/tessdata
cd ..
sudo unzip master.zip
Note: copy the contents into the tesseract-master/tessdata
export TESSDATA_PREFIX=/usr/local/share/
sudo mv ~/tesseract-master/tessdata/* /usr/local/share/tessdata/
test: tesseract --version