Ubuntu – ImageMagick suddenly installed

There are two ways for an app to get to the Software Center:

1. It could be part of the normal repositories: Main, Restricted, Universe and Multiverse. The first two are maintained by Canonical. Universe and Multiverse are a community effort. The best way to land there is to either convince Canonical or Debian that your program is valuable.
2. You can add it through the Canonical developer program. This works quite similar to Apple appstore. You will need to provide the source code and Canonical will review it. This is also the only way to add pay apps.

PPA's are no way related to this, they are independent, they get no review but from the person who set it up. Sometimes, Canonical workers, or package maintainers (the members of the community responsible for some part of the Universe and Multiverse package) can setup a PPA (the Mozilla team does), then some packages from this PPA will likely become official packages. But most of the time complete independent people set a PPA, they have no review policy and their packages will never be part of the official repositories.

Please Note: Even though Honza initially said that he did not want to compile, we discussed using checkinstall to install the compiled package in the comments above. That was just what Honza wanted, as programs installed with checkinstall can be removed like any other package with the package manager.

As we are installing to /opt using checkinstall after the build, we can leave the original imagemagick package in place. (Infact, install the repository version if it is not already installed.) The dependencies can be left installed, and they are no different for the most recent version of imagemagick. What we need to do is install the build dependencies and some other tools first of all:

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall && sudo apt-get build-dep imagemagick

Download the source code from the official site and, using terminal, cd to where the source package is and extract it:

tar -xzvf ImageMagick-6.8.3-9.tar.gz

Now move to that folder with

cd Imagemagick-6.8.3-9

Now, if you want to find out the available options for the build, run

./configure --help

However, mostly everything is already set to enabled, so there is little need to specify anything further, apart from the necessary --prefix. You could use other locations, but we shall use /opt here. Now run configure and make:

./configure --prefix=/opt/imagemagick-6.8 && make

Now, the last thing to do is to use checkinstall to install the package. Make sure you are in the Imagemagick-6.8.3-9 folder and run

sudo checkinstall

You can of course run checkinstall with parameters such as --pkgversion= or choose them after you have run sudo checkinstall, but all the defaults are fine here. The package name that will be created will be called imagemagick-6.8.3-9 and it will be installed in /opt/imagemagick-6.8.

You will now be also able to see the package in Synaptic and manage it just like any other packages, and removing it will not cause problems with other packages.

If you want to run your new versions, you will need to use /opt/imagemagick-6.8/convert, for example, as /opt is not in $PATH, and just running convert will call the repo version. You could create some symlinks if you wanted to always run the /opt version of the programs.

Please note that this is what Honza wanted, even though he initially was averse to compiling, until checkinstall was discussed.