Centos – Adding PNG & JPG support to ImageMagick in PHP on CentOS

Are you sure ImageMagick supports Illustrator files? That's a proprietary format that isn't supported by any programs outside of the the Adobe family AFAIK. I would be very surprised if ImageMagick supported it. It's also not listed on the ImageMagic supported formats page.

Try saving as a PDF, SVG, or any of the supported formats before you pass it to ImageMagick.

Edit:

There appears to be a way to read/manipulate AI files using ImageMagick, but this comes with the proviso that the AI file must be saved with PDF compatibility. If not, it will not work, as ImageMagick by default is configured to read AI files using its PDF coder. Though that isn't to say that someone can't write a custom AI coder for it. However, I've yet to see one and it would be difficult given that AI itself is a closed format (even the latest version of QuarkXpress has imperfect AI support).

Did you have the liblqr headers installed when you compiled imagemagick?

If you're on Debian/Ubuntu, you need to install the liblqr-1-0-dev package.

If you are on Ubuntu, you can also search PPAs. This PPA has imagemagick for karmic in 6.5.5.3 so and is built against liblqr, so it should work.

Edit: I see you're on Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10), so this PPA won't do. So, to make it as clean as possible without making it too complicated, this is what you can do:

  # Create a copy of your sources.list to get the dependencies
  $ cp /etc/apt/sources.list $HOME/imagemagick.list
  # Add the PPA anyway, with deb-src to grab the source
  $ cat <<EOF | tee -a $HOME/imagemagick.list
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/cristiklein/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cristiklein/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
EOF
  # install apt-build
  $ sudo apt-get install apt-build
  # For some reason I had to install libgtk2.0-dev (on Karmic at least)
  $ sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
  # Build and install imagemagick
  $ sudo apt-build --sources-list $HOME/imagemagick.list install imagemagick

That said, Intrepid is getting quite old, and is not even an LTS version, so I'd recommend upgrading.