June 19, 2007...10:51 am

Don’t you wanna feel the RMagick pain ? (or Guide to installing RMagick on Mac OS X)

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If you’re bored at your next family party or are looking to light up a late night party with friends you should try installing RMagick on your Mac. It’s so rewarding when you finally go trough it 6 hours later, exhausted, hungry and with a sense of relief that make you feel like you could fly even after eating at Schwartz.

So here’s a little help to get the party started with installing RMagick on Mac OS X from source.

To setup this stuff at StandoutJobs, my starting point was the Hivelogic tutorial. Everyone seem to have the same error: Bus error. After a couple hours banging my head against our StandoutWalls™ I ended up bleeding from the ears and with this reviewed script:


curl -O http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/\
 freetype/freetype-2.1.10.tar.gz
tar xzvf freetype-2.1.10.tar.gz
cd freetype-2.1.10
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/\
 sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.10.tar.bz2
bzip2 -dc libpng-1.2.10.tar.bz2 | tar xv
cd libpng-1.2.10
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar xzvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
cd tiff-3.8.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Now this part was missing from the original tutorial, ghostscript fonts are needed, get the package from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gs-fonts/ and


tar vzxf ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
sudo mv fonts/ /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/

Another missing was the oh-so-obvious (!) exporting of the variables: CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS, summed up here for your own pleasure:


curl -O http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/\
sourceforge/imagemagick/ImageMagick-6.3.0-0.tar.gz
tar xzvf ImageMagick-6.3.0-0.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.3.0
export CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib
./configure --prefix=/usr/local \
 --disable-static --with-modules --without-perl \
 --without-magick-plus-plus --with-quantum-depth=8 \
 --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
make
sudo make install
cd ..

Now cross your fingers, get your rabit paw, make a little prayer and


sudo gem install RMagick

You’re done (or back to first step)!

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