ImageMagick tomfoolery

[Iritscen]

Sigh. I am not used to feeling this stupid. I'm no genius, mind you. I'm a long-time Mac user, a fairly long-time programmer, but I'm still pretty CLI-illiterate.

All I wanted to do was use Inkscape. Inkscape is a great program, but I really need to be able to open .ai files, and I believe I read somewhere that it relies on ImageMagick. So I d/led IM 6.2.7, compiled and installed it, and used "make check" immediately after, as recommended. It failed 47 of the tests (I have the results if anyone is interested, it's mostly Greek to me, and a *lot* of Greek at that).

It looked, though, like I just might not be able to handle certain formats, and I could still run it. But when I try a command, such as "display [whatever.jpg]", it says "Unable to start 'X' Server".

Isn't that the same thing as X11, the XWindows server? I use X11, and it works fine. What's not working right here?

[nixgeek]

For this particular situation, you might have to manually launch X11. Some apps that require X11 on the Mac will automatically launch X11 if they were provided as binary apps. But since you compiled this yourself, you might not have included the option to do that. Try launching it with X11 already running and see if that works.

[Iritscen]

*grimaces* I already tried that. It just doesn't notice that X11 is open. Interestingly, the X11 app lists "ImageMagick" in its menu along with "xman" and "xlogo". Selecting it simply does nothing.

It's entirely possible that I compiled it wrong. I mean, I simply followed the standard process of ./configure, make, make install. But all that stuff about custom options to use when building was beyond me.

I may have made a mistake in installing ImageMagick twice, although I don't think that's the cause of the problem. But the first version I compiled myself and is installed in /usr/local/bin. The second version was precompiled (http://www.imagemagick.org/download/...n8.6.0.tar.gz), and the binaries are still in the ImageMagick folder. I added the path /Applications/Graphics/ImageMagick-6.2.7/bin to my bash shell and verified that it is part of the $PATH variable, but I don't think I should have both copies installed. I don't actually know which is being called upon when I use the "display" command, or any other. Perhaps I should uninstall the /usr/local/bin version and see if it then uses the other version, and whether that version works.

Is there a recommended way to remove those binaries? Does "make distclean" do that, or does that just remove built products in that folder?

[nixgeek]

To remove what you compiiled all you need to do is type "make uninstall" from within the directory you compiled it from. This is the way I've done it under Linux.

[Iritscen]

Well, that's logical :)

I'll try it tonight and replace this post with the results when I get back here (probably next Tuesday, maybe tomorrow). We'll see if the other install works any better.

[nixgeek]

Keep us posted...

[Iritscen]

Okay, now I'm using the build that came directly from the ImageMagick site, and when I do this:

me$ ./display -help

(or try to open a file with the display command)

I get this:

dyld: Library not loaded: /ImageMagick-6.2.7/lib/libMagick.10.dylib
Referenced from: /Applications/Graphics/ImageMagick-6.2.7/bin/./display
Reason: image not found
Trace/BPT trap

I'm not even loading an image with the -help option! I guess the real problem is that the libraries aren't "loaded". So, what does that mean, exactly? And why does this remind me unpleasantly of Windows?

[nixgeek]

You might want to give DarwinPorts a try. It's basically the Ports system ported over to Darwin (the UNIX-y part of Mac OS X). From here, you might have better luck getting ImageMagick installed along with all the dependencies.

As for it reminding you of Windows, remember that you're dealing with a Unix source package, not a Mac OS binary application, so things will get hairy as they tend to when compiling from source (this also happens in Linux and other Unix operating systems). As an example, there's a Cocoa port of GIMP called Gimp.app that I use and it works flawlessly. It even launches X11 for me and everything. Now, I have no need to compile it from source or download it from a repo like DarwinPorts or Fink. It just works, just like a Mac application should.

Since we're on the topic of binaries, on the ImageMagick website I found a section for binary versions. One of which is for Mac OS X (ImageMagick-powerpc-apple-darwin8.6.0.tar.gz) and further down the page there are instructions on what variables need to be changed on your Mac OS X installation.

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php

Give those a try and see if any of those work for you.