Ok, welp. Just so it's here for anyone else that has this problem.
So Far this is where I'm at. Hopefully with a little help someone will spot the last little probelm and point the way to the magic light.


Problem: Jpeg support not compiled into ImageMagic

Gentoo System, Installed ImageMagic via the portage tree with default settings.

Solution (partial) so far

Download libjpeg-6b from http://www.imagemagick.org/download/delegates/

./configure
make
make install


Unmerge via portage ImageMagick.
Copy ImageMagick (latest editon) from the portage/bin directory to a temp directory, bunzip it, untar it.

./configure -with-jpg -with whatever else you want in there, (Read the install-unix-txt file in the Image Magic directory you just untar'd)

make
make install

http://www. Your website/forums/ ubbthreads.php?ubb=captcha&t=im&test=1 to test and I get an even larger error msg than when I started. All of it saying basically it doesn't know how to deal with .ttf files.

PHP error: convert: FreeType library is not available

Downloaded and installed the freetype-2.3.5 delegate tried the whole thing again... Still no freetype. Any Ideas???