zanshine cg artwork, music and software development

If you want to run the latest development version of gimp (2.7.x) in ubuntu 11.10, here’s how to achieve that in a few command lines.

Note that the following has been tested successfully on Ubuntu 11.x freshly installed and updated systems.

You will not be able to compile the current 2.7 gimp snapshot on lucid, as it requires a higher version of glibc than the one included by the distribution. It’s still possible to compile it on lucid, but if you know how to do that, you don’t need me anymore :)

So, I’ve written a little bash script to automate the process of compiling the gimp’s latest development version and its dependencies, which should work fine on a fresh Oneiric install.

Just download the script or clone the git repository, configure if necessary, and execute.

If you don’t have the git command, you may install it. That will help you in keeping the script up to date:

sudo aptitude install git-core

Then:

git clone git://github.com/zanshine/gimp-razor.git
cd gimp-razor
./gimp-razor

Alternatively, if you don’t want to use git, you can download the script (https://raw.github.com/zanshine/gimp-razor/master/gimp-razor), make it executable and run:

wget https://raw.github.com/zanshine/gimp-razor/master/gimp-razor
chmod u+x gimp-razor
./gimp-razor

That’s it!

Out of the box, this script will retrieve the latest gimp sources and it’s unmet dependencies on ubuntu 11.10, wich are gegl and babl.

It will compile gimp under ~/opt/gimp/build_$build_id, where $build_id is a simple timestamp. So you’ll be able to make nightly builds if you want, without breaking the old ones. At the end of the process, your newly cutting edge gimp will be launched.

Please, report any issues you have with the script, and I’ll try to solve them quickly.