This used to be quite a complicated task to install ImageMagick and RMagick from source, but these days (thanks to some great work by others) it’s a piece of cake…

First install ImageMagick using this install script hosted on github (http://github.com/masterkain/ImageMagick-sl):

cd ~/src
git clone git://github.com/masterkain/ImageMagick-sl.git
cd ImageMagick-sl
sh install_im.sh

Now simply sit back and wait. (Oh, you’ll need to enter your password at some points as the libraries are installed into /usr/local).

Then, once that’s done, RMagick is installed by:

gem install rmagick

Simples. :)