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20th Apr 2007, 6:26am

Rmagick on OSX, bus error

After much fretting, I discovered that using RMagick with ImageMagick on OSX just doesn't work.

Once you have messed around with setting your DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH or DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH correctly, all you get when you try to load up rmagick is:

[BUG] Bus Error

Frustrating. But I'm not the only one to have found this. If you read Patrick Lenz's article, you'll see that he found a solution.

So installing GraphicsMagick is the answer. But I was not too keen to follow Patrick's recipe and install Darwin Ports on my system, having just gone to some trouble to install Fink when setting up ImageMagick.

Fink makes a directory /sw on your system, and installs all the software it downloads in there. I used fink to download and install libjpeg, and it worked very well.

However, fink does not know about GraphicsMagick. So you need to install that by hand. Here's how I did it:

1. Download graphicsmagick, and un zip/tar it.
2. Set your library path up, make sure it includes your new libjpeg libraries:
   export DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib:/sw/lib/
3. Make sure the build process can find the files from fink:
   export LDFLAGS=-L/sw/lib
   export CPPFLAGS=-I/sw/include
4. Configure graphicsmagick - don't bother to make the perl extensions:
   ./configure --without-perl
5. make
6. sudo make install

Note that you need to remove imagemagick from your system before this will work - rmagick prefers it over graphicsmagick.