Installing ImageMagick

You’ll find ImageMagick in the repositories of OpenIndiana and pretty much every Linux distro. You’ll also find it in the repositories of FreeBSD and its desktop-oriented derivatives, such as GhostBSD and MidnightBSD. With only a couple of slight caveats, installation is quick and easy.

The first caveat concerns Debian. As you may already know, Debian tends to march to the beat of a different drummer, and is quite slow about getting up-to-date packages in its repositories.

So, if you’re installing ImageMagick on Debian 12 or older, you’ll get the older ImageMagick 6, rather than the current ImageMagick 7. (You might get version 7 if you switch to either Debian Testing or Debian Unstable, but I haven’t confirmed that since I prefer to stick with the stable branch.)

The other caveat is that there’s no consistency in how the various distros name the ImageMagick package. For example, the package name is ImageMagick...