You may be wondering why I should install GIMP via Git and go through all of the "trouble" when I have a short way out via apt-get or deb package or tar ball or many other ways depending on your OS or Linux distribution. Well, one reason can be you want to use the latest update as soon as they're pushed in the repository. The other, more probable one, can be that you want to contribute to GIMP and are looking for a guide that helps you to compile and make GIMP from source, apart from the GIMP which you may already have.
This guide is tested on Ubuntu 14.04 32 bit, I can only hope it works on other distros of linux as well. :p
Tip-off: Use the most recent version of your distro or if you have LTS installed on your machine then make sure it is up-to-date.Step 1:
Let's create a directory where we will store all the clones or tar balls. Fire up the terminal and run the following commands. (I'd recommend not to close the terminal session until the installation is done)
mkdir -p ~/sourcefiles cd ~/sourcefiles
Step 2:
Get the latest source code of GIMP from https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp using one of the following commands.
git clone git://git.gnome.org/gimpOR
git clone https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp
This might take few minutes depending on connection speed. Feed your pet by the time its cloned. :D
Step 3:
Now, you wouldn't want the GIMP you already have in your machine to interfere with the GIMP you're going to install. So let's set the path for the new GIMP.
prefix=/opt/gimp export PATH=$prefix/bin:$PATH export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$prefix/lib/pkgconfig export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$prefix/lib
Step 4:
While compiling the GIMP source, you'll need lot of GIMP development dependencies. So let's install them first.
sudo apt-get build-dep gimp
This might take quite a time depending on connection speed. Meanwhile have a coffee or something. :p
Step 5:
We should also have babl and gegl packages before we start compiling GIMP source.
For babl:
cd ~/tmp git clone git://git.gnome.org/babl cd babl ./autogen.sh --prefix=$prefix make sudo make install
For gegl:
cd ~/tmp git clone git://git.gnome.org/gegl cd gegl ./configure --prefix=$prefix make sudo make install
Note: Please drop a comment below (along with the error) if you face any issue while building and installing babl or gegl
Step 6:
Now we are ready to build GIMP from source.
cd ~/tmp/gimp ./configure --prefix=$prefix
Look out for any errors. You might be missing any dependencies or packages. Feel free to comment below if you face any difficulties and share how you solved it. I'll append your comment in the Issues and Resolves section below. If you can't figure out the resolve for your problem the GIMP community is always there to help. Join us on IRC. Server: GimpNet Channel:#gimp
Once it is compiled, run the following.
make sudo make installTime to test the product to make sure everything went well.
/opt/gimp/bin/gimp-2.9
Your version might be different according to the source. 2.9 was the latest source at the time of this writing. Welcome to the GIMP Developers' world :)
Disclaimer:
This guide was meant for beginners and has been made easy using the following sources:
[1] Martin Nordholts' Tutorial
[2] GimpUsers.com Tutorial (This link is down at the moment)
Issues and resolves:
The issues you might face solely depend on your system's state. You might be missing libraries that the latest source of GIMP needs.
sudo apt-get build-dep gimp installs the libraries that are needed by the stable version of GIMP. The latest source code of GIMP might require more. I faced following issues while compiling GIMP 2.9 :
1. Missing
gexiv2
. This gnome wiki link should have you with that. But make sure instead of
./configure --enable-introspection run
./configure --prefix=$prefix --enable-introspection
gexiv2
package,
g-ir-scanner
was missing. This can be solved by
sudo apt-get install gobject-introspection
Welcome to the world of Open Source
Eviva
