Falappa.Net

So you are on Ubuntu 7.04 and you want to compile the bleeding edge version of GIMP…

You’ve just checked out the HEAD revision out of the GIMP code repository (as roughly written here) and created your shiny local working copy, you fire up the terminal, read the HACKING file and find that you must have a lot of software development tools installed (a compile tool-chain). After all GIMP is a very big and complex GNOME/Gtk/X-window application (maybe one of the biggest if not the biggest).

You may now wonder which packages do I need to install on Ubuntu to get all the stuff I need to successfully compile GIMP?

Usually the trial and error process involves launching the compile process (autogen.sh and configure scripts in our case), look for errors caused by missing modules/libraries, lookup on the Ubuntu package database site which package the library/module belongs to and then install that package.

I went trough that process once, I report here my findings for the lazy programmer.

To compile the GIMP on Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” you must have the following packages installed:

• build-essential
• bison
• libglib2.0-dev
• libgtk2.0-dev
• gtk-doc-tools
• libart-2.0-dev
• python-dev
• python-gtk2-dev
• libtiff-dev

Depending on the extra functionality you would like to have (such as reading and writing some image file formats) you may also need the following optional packages installed:

• libmng-dev
• libxpm-dev
• libexif-dev
• libwmf-dev
• libgnomeui-dev
• librsvg2-dev
• libgtkhtml2-dev
• libpoppler-dev
• libpoppler-glib-dev

For the lazyest programmers here are the two apt-get lines (beware of line wrapping) to have those packages installed at once:

sudo apt-get install build-essential bison libglib2.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev gtk-doc-tools libart-2.0-dev python-dev python-gtk2-dev libtiff-dev

sudo apt-get install libmng-dev libxpm-dev libexif-dev libwmf-dev libgnomeui-dev librsvg2-dev libgtkhtml2-dev libpoppler-dev libpoppler-glib-dev

That’s all folks, happy compiling!