Installing imagemagick on Ubuntu for use with your Rails application (if you user Paperclip for example) should be pretty easy using apt-get:


sudo apt-get install libmagickwand-dev
sudo apt-get install imagemagick librmagick-ruby1.8 librmagick-ruby-doc libfreetype6-dev xml-core -y


so now it’s done.
Unfortunately during one of my instalations, I ran into a problem where the delegate libraries for jpg, png, etc where not being picked up. ex:


convert -list configure


The solution for this is to install Imagemagick by hand, ex:

mkdir source
cd source
wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xvfz ImageMagick.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.6.5-8
./configure --disable-shared
make
sudo make install


and now you should be able to use the identify or the convert command successfully on your image files.