If like me you’ve tried to update the rmagick gem on a gutsy (or older) release of ubuntu, the outdated nature of your imagemagick installation has been brought to your attention. Kind of amusing how out of date this particular package has been. shrug

Luckily the version in Hardy Heron will suffice our needs, so this is how I went about backporting it for anyone wishing to do the same.

Prepare..

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  sudo apt-get update 
  sudo apt-get build-dep imagemagick
  sudo aptitude install libdjvulibre-dev libgraphviz3-dev

Aquire..

Grab the imagemagick source package from the heron release..

1. Go to the imagemagick page in launchpad, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/i386/imagemagick
2. Click the published version link on the right which at this time will take you to: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/i386/imagemagick/7:6.3.7.9.dfsg1-2ubuntu1
3. Download the tar and diff links near the top of that page.
4. unpack the tar somewhere and apply the patch

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  tar zxvf imagemagick_6.3.7.9.dfsg1.orig.tar.gz 
  zcat imagemagick_6.3.7.9.dfsg1-2ubuntu1.diff.gz |patch -p0

 apt-get source imagemagick 

I suppose you could probably also update your sources to hardy, update and do the apt-get source, put your sources back to gutsy and update again.. whatever works for you, don’t go blaming me if you accidentally find yourself checking out how awesome the hardy heron release is though.

Carress..

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  cd imagemagick-6.3.7.9.dfsg1
  sed -i 's/libgraphviz-dev/libgraphviz3-dev/' debian/control

Build..

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  sudo dpkg-buildpackage && cd .. && ls -l *deb 

Install..

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  sudo dpkg -i l*deb i*deb p*deb

Enjoy..