Debian Woody ships with an older version of Webmagick, Imagemagick and
Perlmagick.  If you select to load Webmagick, all will install properly
and it will be immediately usable.  I recommend this for anyone who is
doing a one time conversion or is doing just  a few files on continual
basis.  My definition of a few files is less than 300.  I was converting
1800+ 15Kbyte files a night and it was taking about 3 hours to run.
Also, it was eating 2 Gigabytes of memory and putting the system load at
close to 3 (2.6GHz P4 w/ 1 Gig mem and 2 Gig swap).  I had a backlog of
pictures (about 20,000) so this was not going to work for me.

If you decide to Download the latest versions, your reward will be a
memory usage of less than 20Megs and a runtime of around 5 minutes.  For
me, this was an absolute necessity.

===  Getting the software  ====

Webmagick -- http://webmagick.sourceforge.net/
Imagemagick -- http://www.imagemagick.org/

I placed both tars in the /usr/src directory and unpacked them there.

=== Preparing the system  ====

If you started by installing the debian versions first, YOU MUST DO
THESE STEPS

1)  Remove the packages including removing the configuration files.  In
dselect, use the '_' instead of the '-' to remove the packages.  This
removes configuration information as well.  The packages to remove are:
webmagick, imagemagick, perlmagick and libmagick.

2) Run: find / -name "*agick*"    against the system and remove any
remnants that may be there including any leftover directory structures.

I failed to properly clean my system, and as a result chased some
strange errors for several days before doing this level of scrubbing.
It seems that Perlmagick will pick up on old files and try to execute
things that are  no longer there.

==== Preparing to build Imagemagick  ====

You are going to need a few packages before you can build Imagemagick

Install ghostscript:  gsfonts, gs, gs-common  
Install perl development:  libperl-dev
Install jpeg support: libjpeg62-dev
Install freetype support:  libfreetype6-dev

Some of these will bring in other packages as well and that is fine.

====  Building Imagemagick  ====

Follow the 'INSTALL-unix.txt' instructions in the root of the
Imagemagick source directory.  These are well written and fairly short.
Make the following changes:

    ./configure --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts
The path to the ghostscript fonts is incorrect for Debian. So, when you
invoke configure you will need to use the command line option to tell it
where debian puts the fonts.  You're output from configure should look
something like this:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
Imagemagick is configured as follows. Please verify that this
configuration matches your expectations.

Host system type : i686-pc-linux-gnu

Option            Configure option              Configured value
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shared libraries  --enable-shared=no            no
Static libraries  --enable-static=yes           yes
GNU ld            --with-gnu-ld=yes             yes
LZW support       --enable-lzw=no               no
Quantum depth     --with-quantum-depth=16       16

Delegate Configuration:
BZLIB             --with-bzlib=yes              no
DPS               --with-dps=yes                no
EXIF              --with-exif=yes               no
FlashPIX          --with-fpx=yes                no
FreeType 2.0      --with-ttf=yes                yes
Ghostscript       None                          /usr/bin/gs (6.53)
Ghostscript fonts --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts
/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/
Ghostscript lib   --with-gslib=no               no
JBIG              --with-jbig=yes               no
JPEG v1           --with-jpeg=yes               yes
JPEG-2000         --with-jp2=yes                no
LCMS              --with-lcms=yes               no
Magick++          --with-magick-plus-plus=yes   yes
PERL              --with-perl=yes               /usr/bin/perl
PNG               --with-png=yes                no
TIFF              --with-tiff=yes               no
Windows fonts     --with-windows-font-dir=      none
WMF               --with-wmf=yes                no
X11               --with-x=                     no
XML               --with-xml=yes                no
ZLIB              --with-zlib=yes               no

X11 Configuration:

  Not using X11.

Options used to compile and link:
  CC       = gcc
  CFLAGS   = -g -O2 -Wall
  CPPFLAGS = -I/usr/include/freetype2 -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64
-D_REENTRANT
  CXX      = g++
  CXXFLAGS = -g -O2
  LDFLAGS  = -L/usr/lib
  LIBS     = -lfreetype -ljpeg -lpthread -lm

------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
The "Configured value" column is the important one.  Make sure that all
the yes' and values are in the right place for what your trying to do.
As you can see, I did not want PNG support, but you may...


          

However, Mike Williams has for several years produced an excellent package for Debian systems that I can unconditionally recommend. (But, as Mike says, don't try to mix RMagick from unstable with ImageMagick from stable!)

apt-get install subversion libapache2-svn subversion-tools