ImageMagick Issues - Can't locate files

So here is my story... I ran gallery2 on an old web server of mine, it went down so I backed up my data director and my database. I installed gallery2 fresh on my new server (Linux adamdaley 3.2.0-31-generic #50-Ubuntu SMP Fri Sep 7 16:16:45 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux)

Gallery2 seems to work, it's got my data/text but only my LARGE images work. Okay so looking into it ImageMagick seems to not work properly. I've installed ImageMagick and it works in the linux shell however anytime I'm in my site admin area and try and "TEST" the toolkit, I get the following:

The path you entered is not a valid directory or is not accessible.

Now I do have it installed, i've verified it and it's found here:

root@adamdaley:~# whereis convert
convert: /usr/local/bin/convert /usr/share/man/man1/convert.1.gz

However, no dice in the gallery2 config. I've made sure its pointing to /usr/local/bin

I've also had it installed in /usr/bin earlier and no dice there (i've since reinstalled it with the --disable-openmp flag and still no luck..

So im at a loss as to how to get this working. Any advice? I control the virtual server so I can do whatever I need to, i have complete root access.

UPDATE: I was able to fix the open_basedir portion of apache, so now gallery2 i THINK seems ImageMagick... at least when I hit "SAVE" or "TEST" at the ImageMagick toolkit page... it goes to another page, but that page is all white... so SOMETHING screwy is going on... any thoughts?

Gallery URL = http://www.fdphotos.net/gallery2/main.php
Gallery version = 2.3.1 core 1.3.0.1
API = Core 7.54, Module 3.9, Theme 2.6, Embed 1.5
PHP version = 4.4.9 apache2handler
Webserver = Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.7a mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/4.4.9
Database = mysql 4.1.22-standard-log, lock.system=flock
Toolkits = Exif, ArchiveUpload, ImageMagick, LinkItemToolkit, SquareThumb, Gd, Getid3, Thumbnail