Webmagick and Imagemagick on Debian Woody - A Tutorial
Webmagick and Imagemagick are very capable image manipulation utilities.
I needed to create a "montage" of thumbnails for a website on a nightly
basis. To do this I decided from surveying the user groups that
webmagick was the way to go. Indeed, it now works flawlessly. Getting
here was a bit of a learning curve (especially for a perl novice.)
To help the rest of my debian brothers, I submit this email to the
archives of the webmagick, imagemagick and debian-users mailing lists.
This is for Debian Woody. I don't claim this to work or be necessary on
other distributions.
Debian Woody ships with an older version of Webmagick, Imagemagick and
Perlmagick. If you select to load Webmagick, all will install properly
and it will be immediately usable. I recommend this for anyone who is
doing a one time conversion or is doing just a few files on continual
basis. My definition of a few files is less than 300. I was converting
1800+ 15Kbyte files a night and it was taking about 3 hours to run.
Also, it was eating 2 Gigabytes of memory and putting the system load at
close to 3 (2.6GHz P4 w/ 1 Gig mem and 2 Gig swap). I had a backlog of
pictures (about 20,000) so this was not going to work for me.
If you decide to Download the latest versions, your reward will be a
memory usage of less than 20Megs and a runtime of around 5 minutes. For
me, this was an absolute necessity.
=== Getting the software ====
Webmagick -- http://webmagick.sourceforge.net/
Imagemagick -- http://www.imagemagick.org/
I placed both tars in the /usr/src directory and unpacked them there.
=== Preparing the system ====
If you started by installing the debian versions first, YOU MUST DO
THESE STEPS
1) Remove the packages including removing the configuration files. In
dselect, use the '_' instead of the '-' to remove the packages. This
removes configuration information as well. The packages to remove are:
webmagick, imagemagick, perlmagick and libmagick.
2) Run: find / -name "*agick*" against the system and remove any
remnants that may be there including any leftover directory structures.
I failed to properly clean my system, and as a result chased some
strange errors for several days before doing this level of scrubbing.
It seems that Perlmagick will pick up on old files and try to execute
things that are no longer there.
==== Preparing to build Imagemagick ====
You are going to need a few packages before you can build Imagemagick
Install ghostscript: gsfonts, gs, gs-common
Install perl development: libperl-dev
Install jpeg support: libjpeg62-dev
Install freetype support: libfreetype6-dev
Some of these will bring in other packages as well and that is fine.
==== Building Imagemagick ====
Follow the 'INSTALL-unix.txt' instructions in the root of the
Imagemagick source directory. These are well written and fairly short.
Make the following changes:
./configure --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts
The path to the ghostscript fonts is incorrect for Debian. So, when you
invoke configure you will need to use the command line option to tell it
where debian puts the fonts. You're output from configure should look
something like this:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
Imagemagick is configured as follows. Please verify that this
configuration matches your expectations.
Host system type : i686-pc-linux-gnu
Option Configure option Configured value
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shared libraries --enable-shared=no no
Static libraries --enable-static=yes yes
GNU ld --with-gnu-ld=yes yes
LZW support --enable-lzw=no no
Quantum depth --with-quantum-depth=16 16
Delegate Configuration:
BZLIB --with-bzlib=yes no
DPS --with-dps=yes no
EXIF --with-exif=yes no
FlashPIX --with-fpx=yes no
FreeType 2.0 --with-ttf=yes yes
Ghostscript None /usr/bin/gs (6.53)
Ghostscript fonts --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts
/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/
Ghostscript lib --with-gslib=no no
JBIG --with-jbig=yes no
JPEG v1 --with-jpeg=yes yes
JPEG-2000 --with-jp2=yes no
LCMS --with-lcms=yes no
Magick++ --with-magick-plus-plus=yes yes
PERL --with-perl=yes /usr/bin/perl
PNG --with-png=yes no
TIFF --with-tiff=yes no
Windows fonts --with-windows-font-dir= none
WMF --with-wmf=yes no
X11 --with-x= no
XML --with-xml=yes no
ZLIB --with-zlib=yes no
X11 Configuration:
Not using X11.
Options used to compile and link:
CC = gcc
CFLAGS = -g -O2 -Wall
CPPFLAGS = -I/usr/include/freetype2 -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64
-D_REENTRANT
CXX = g++
CXXFLAGS = -g -O2
LDFLAGS = -L/usr/lib
LIBS = -lfreetype -ljpeg -lpthread -lm
------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
The "Configured value" column is the important one. Make sure that all
the yes' and values are in the right place for what your trying to do.
As you can see, I did not want PNG support, but you may...
make and make install work as advertised. So just run them.
Once they are completed, cd to the PerlMagick directory under the
ImageMagick directory and run the following commands:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install
make test
I have no idea why this is necessary, but without doing this various
necessary library files seem to be missing in the installation. The
last line is not really necessary, but you should get a descent number
of the test to run. I got around 60% of the main test and about 90% of
the subtests. Failures are caused by packages not being enabled (like
X11 support which webmagick does not need).
==== Testing the installation ===
Ok, if all this worked (and it should) you should be able to do the
following (This is directly from the Imagemagick developers email to
me):
Before concerning yourself with PerlMagick and WebMagick make sure
ImageMagick can read jpegs. Type
convert -list format
Is JPEG listed:
JPEG* JPEG rw- Joint Photographic Experts Group JFIF format
(62)
JPG* JPEG rw- Joint Photographic Experts Group JFIF format
If not, go back to config.log to determine why the configure program
failed to accept your JPEG installation.
If JPEG is listed, type
convert logo: logo.jpg
identify logo.jpg
If all this works, PerlMagick should be able to read JPEG images. To
test, run this script:
use Image::Magick;
$image=Image::Magick->new():
$x = $image->Read('logo.jpg');
warn "$x" if $x;
$x = $image->Write('image.jpg');
warn "$x" if $x;
If the above script works, WebMagick should be able to read JPEG images.
For Perl newbie's like myself, take the little perl script above and put
it into an executable file. Then run it by typing:
#perl [NameOfFile]
You should get no output, that is, it should run clean without warnings
or errors.
==== Building Webmagick ===
The top part of the INSTALL instructions in the Webmagick source
directory talk about configuring ImageMagick. You can skip these steps
because you have already carefully performed them above. About half way
down the document, you will come to the configure step for Webmagick.
My command looked like:
./configure --prefix= /usr/share/apache/webmagick
Because I wanted the pictures placed in the area that apache uses for
shared components. You will also want to add the following lines to
your apache/httpd.conf file:
#
# Aliases: Add here as many aliases as you need (with no limit). The
format is
# Alias fakename realname
#
# Note that if you include a trailing / on fakename then the server will
# require it to be present in the URL. So "/icons" isn't aliased in
this
# example, only "/icons/"..
#
Alias /webmagick/ /usr/share/apache/webmagick/
<Directory /usr/share/apache/webmagick>
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
Now any virtual servers can get to the webmagick images with
http://[yourvirtualdomain]/webmagick/
I forget how I answered all the other questions it asked, but rerunning
it works just fine so feel free to experiment.
==== Some final fixes ===
The current version of Webmagick and Imagemagick (more specifically
Perlmagick) are out of sync with each other. It may happen that
webmagick ends up using GraphicsMagick's PerlMagick
(http://www.graphicsmagick.org/) instead. However, today you would have
to do some searching and replacing to make that happen. To get
Webmagick working the way we are going, make the following edits to the
/bin/webmagick file:
Change:
$opt_thumbcompose = 'Replace'; # Thumbnail image composition
operation
To:
$opt_thumbcompose = 'Copy'; # Thumbnail image composition
operation
Comment out:
# $montageArguments .= "foreground=>\'$opt_thumbforeground\',\n "
# if $opt_thumbforeground ne 'false';
==== Runing Webmagick ===
That's all folks! You should be able to run a nice quiet montage now
with a command like:
webmagick --iconbase ../../../../webmagick
Have Fun!!!
Keith Goettert, CIO, Lightwave Access, LLC. Keith@LightwaveAccess.net
Reply to: