Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

Hi - this is a follow-up to an attempt I made in April to install ImageMagick on my Mac. I never succeeded and went on to other things, but the requirement has come back and I am still clueless. I start from the position of being a long-term Mac user (and a Windows user for that matter) but never having used Unix in any flavour nor a modern command-line interface (I don't count the ones I used 50 years ago). I can cope with IM's command line but only if I can install IM in the first place. I have not succeeded in doing this with MacOS Lion (10.7.2).

It seems I need MacPorts - the relevant version seems to be 2.0.3. Alarmingly (to me) this requires Xcode. I managed to download Xcode for Lion and restarted my machine, but MacPorts still couldn't be installed. because its installer says

"Xcode is not installed, or was installed with UNIX Development (10.5+) or Command Line Support (10.4) deselected."

Xcode IS installed, and there is no sign of any way of selecting the bits apparently deselected, nor or them being downloadable from the Apple Developers site. So I have fallen at the first fence. How I wish there was a DMG file to allow one to install IM and get on with it - but as there isn't, can someone tell me the steps I need to take to get IM installed, bearing in mind that I don't even know how to get at the command line interface on my Mac (is it Terminal, by any chance?).

Sorry to be so dumb.

TIA

Hold the front page! I found out via the MacPorts list (which I felt obliged to join) that when one installs Xcode on a Mac, one only installs an installer!!! That is, the first install just puts the Xcode installer into the Applications folder on the Mac. I'm now doing the REAL install and may therefore get further in installing IM, but I think it's premature to close the topic. Sorry about this, but this was a completely unexpected phenomenon.

As I suspected, that wasn't the end of the story. I did EXACTLY what was suggested on the IM website to install using my shiny new copy of MacPorts via Terminal, and I got:

graham-samuels-macbook:~ Graham$ $magick> sudo port install ImageMagick
Error: Insufficient privileges to write to MacPorts install prefix.

What does this mean? I am the admin user of this machine. How can I give myself further privileges? What's an install prefix? This is so difficult for someone who just wants to use IM either directly or through shell to cooperate with apps that work through the ordinary OSX GUI. I will search elsewhere but I would be very grateful to hear from someone who knows what to do in these circumstances.

TIA

OK, another search led me to a long conversation about this problem on the MacPorts list, which culminated in:

Re: Insufficient privileges?
<earachefl <at> comcast.net>
2011-04-19 01:36:29 GMT

As the original poster, I must apologize... I was trying to run "$magick> sudo port install ImageMagick"
literally, with "$magick>" included. Once I simply ran "sudo port install ImageMagick" all was well.

Typical newbie, stirring up a mess 'o trouble.

So this guy took the instructions literally, exactly as I did, and got into the same mess.

Frankly I'm astonished that I had to do this much research and this much downloading and tinkering just to get to first base with a binary copy of IM: I guess it shows that IM is not really a Mac program at all in the ordinary sense of the words - it may run on Macs, but you need to be a nerd to get it started, and it needs a mass (gigabytes!) of software at its back, and a huge amount of time (hours!) before you can even install it. If your primary interest is manipulating certain graphic files, this installation process seems a massive diversion and a total put-off for an 'ordinary' computer user like say a teacher of a non-technical subject. As there is a Windows exe, couldn't there be a Mac dmg? I am not referring to the command-line aspects of the thing, just its installation path. As to uninstall, I very much doubt if I would be able to master it, so I guess IM will now stay in my machine until it dies.

Although I may have wasted some people's time, I think this conversation (with myself) may be of use to other newbies, so I don't entirely regret bringing the subject up.

Yes, $magick> is just an example directory. Perhaps the docs should be changed to leave that off or say something like at your terminal prompt or $yourdirectory or as is on my Mac yourdirectory?, eg. freds-mac-mini:~ fred$

That would be good, but an installable .dmg would be great! It took more time and resources to get IM working on Mac OSX Lion than it did to install Lion itself. It's just an app, for goodness' sake! I am not averse to struggling with the command line interface (although the existing documentation seems to me pretty eccentric!) but the installation was an incredible turn-off.

The documentation appears to have been changed so that the prompt (with example magick directory) $magick> is now replace with the simple prompt $.