Ok, I have determined why I was having so many issues installing the latest version of GrADS (v2.2.1) the other day... My system is 64-bit and I was trying to install the 32-bit version... Doh!
Here are the commands that I used for v2.2.1:
cd /usr/local/lib/grads
wget ftp://cola.gmu.edu/grads/data2.tar.gz
tar -zxvf data2.tar.gz
cd
clear
wget ftp://cola.gmu.edu/grads/Supplibs/2.2/builds/supplibs-centos7.4-x86_64.tar.gz
tar -zxvf supplibs-centos7.4-x86_64.tar.gz
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl1.0.0 libssl-dev libjpeg62-dev libgeotiff-dev
sudo apt-get install libtiff-dev
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl1.0.0 libssl-dev libjpeg62-dev libgeotiff-dev
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/grads/supplibs/libpng15.so.15 /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/grads/supplibs/libhdf5.so.8 /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/grads/supplibs/libnetcdf.so.7 /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/grads/supplibs/libhdf5_hl.so.8 /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/grads/supplibs/libtiff.so.3 /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/grads/supplibs/libgeotiff.so /usr/lib/
sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.10
sudo apt-get install libjpeg62-dev