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ImageMagick

The ImageMagick suite is a great set of commandline image editing tools, now available for the Zaurus. I have been using ImageMagick tools on a remote host box for years, and I have just started using them directly on my Sharp ROMs. However, this page lists all the ImageMagick packages I have found for any Zaurus ROM, not just for Sharp ROMs.

There is a wealth of online documentation about how to use ImageMagick at http://www.imagemagick.org/. We can even create banners and embed text in images using ImageMagick commands!

Please note that I do not know completely which ImageMagick tools and options will function with the limited memory of the Zaurus. Some work, some do not, and how many are compatible will depend on your particular distribution and how much space is available for processing the images.

For some examples of how to use selected ImageMagick commands and create scripts using tools in ImageMagick, see my pages about making images Zaurus friendly and about crop.sh.

I know some but not all of the command options will work on my Sharp ROMs. As I mentioned above, I have been using these tools for years on a host box. I have just recently installed the ImageMagick suite on my Collie and Tosa, and if you wish to read about my personal progress testing the Zaurus compatibility of these tools, read my comments below.

Note that while the actual binaries from the IPKs below may be able to work on our ROMs, the commands will not work until all the appropriate libraries have been installed. To see what is missing, use the ldd command.

I have installed the Cacko version on my Tosa. The installation required adding three libraries and doing some tweaking, but I can certify that the identify command, and certain functions of the convert command, now work for me on my sl6000 running Sharp ROM 1.12. See additional comments below for more details and to read about my progress. I will only be trying out the other command line tools in the suite if I need them.

Sharp/Cacko/OpenZaurus

The following are possible ImageMagick IPK sources for Sharp/Cacko/OpenZaurus.

http://soft.vub.ac.be/~dwagelaa/download/zaurus/cacko/ImageMagick_5.5.7-0_arm.ipk
 
http://www.zaurususergroup.org/feed/imagemagick_5.5.3-1_arm.ipk
 
http://www.focv.com/ipkg/stable/ImageMagick_6.2.8.0-1-noX_arm.ipk
 
http://zaurus.daemons.gr/menaie/feed/ImageMagick_6.2.5-1-noX_arm.ipk

ImageMagick for pdaXrom

http://zaurus.sources.ru/feed/pdaxrom/rc9/imagemagick_6.2.1_armv5tel.ipk
 
http://members.iinet.net.au/~wyso/myZaurus/pdaXii13/feed/custom/imagemagick_6.2.5_armv5tel.ipk

ImageMagick for Angstrom

http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/repo/?pkgname=imagemagick

General Comments

Of course, since I installed a Cacko version on an expansion card with my Sharp ROM using ipkg from the command line instead of using the Package Installer, I had all sorts of issues. There were missing libraries, and my SD card was vfat, so ipkg complained it could not create symlinks. I ended up finding and installing the libraries on my SD card, and creating symlinks in internal memory to the binaries and libraries which ldd identified as missing.

The libraries missing from Sharp ROM 1.12, when I ran ldd and attempted to run ImageMagick 5.5.7, were libpng12.so.0, libxml2.so.2 and libfreetype.so.6. I found all three libraries and downloaded and installed them, using the ipks from Dennis Wagelaar's Cacko Feed at:

http://soft.vub.ac.be/~dwagelaa/download/zaurus/cacko/

I am in the process of testing ImageMagick commands on my Tosa as I need them. Scaling and changing image formats works for some file types and sizes but trying to change a tiff file to a jpg, I found I was missing libtiff, so ldd only checks basic required libraries, more libraries may be required by specific command options.

Some ImageMagick commands definitely are causing problems due to memory constraints in my Zaurus. ImageMagick can be very memory hungary when processing files of even 500k, and some of my scripts using ImageMagick commands have crashed with Segmentation Faults. In other cases, I got the out of memory popup because I had other applications open and also had very little free buffer space at the time I was running ImageMagick.

But although there are constraints in using ImageMagick, I am happy I have installed it. The one thing it can definitely do beautifully on the Zaurus is change screenshots from bitmap to jpg. That function with convert works without a problem. Pretty useful, since color screenshots are about 900k, and scale down to less than 100k when I simply change the file type using the convert command.

convert scrn0001.bmp scrn0001.jpg

For a few more examples of ImageMagick commands, see my page about making images Zaurus friendly. For a lot more documentation and examples, use your friendly search engine, or explore the http://www.imagemagick.org/ site itself.

If you find any broken links above, or know of additional feeds containing ImageMagick ipks for the Zaurus, please write sdjf at oesf.

Page created December 18, 2011