Installing GIMP 2.7 on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic

I wanted to try the latest version of GIMP, to see the long sought after single-window mode in action.

Method 1 - PPA

The first, and by far the easiest method is by using the PPA on this page: https://launchpad.net/~matthaeus123/+archive/mrw-gimp-svn

You simply add the repo with this command: 

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn

and then add the GPG key:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 405A15CB

PROBLEM HTTP fetch error 7: couldn't connect to host
SOLUTION Open up the outbound TCP port 11371

Then you can install gimp using apt-get (or simply run an update if you already had it installed).


Method 2 - From source

The second method is to install it from source, and while this is much more of a challenge, it doesn't rely on any third party PPAs...

PREPERATION
3 commands to modify (change /home/jack to your home dir), and execute:

mkdir /home/jack/programs/gimp-2.7

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/jack/programs/gimp-2.7/lib/pkgconfig/:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/jack/programs/gimp-2.7/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

INSTRUCTIONS

Download gimp-2.7.0.tar.bz2 from http://www.gimp.org/, and extract it and run the installation commands:

./configure --prefix=/home/jack/programs/gimp-2.7

make

sudo make install

But of course I encountered loads of problems during the configuration stage:

PROBLEM configure: error: Your intltool is too old. You need intltool 0.40.1 or later.

SOLUTION sudo apt-get install intltool

PROBLEM No package 'babl' found

SOLUTION Found http://developer.gimp.org/git.html which has lots of the tools you will probably need including babl and gegl. Eventually found my way to ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/babl and downloaded the latest version of babl (for me, this was 0.1/babl-0.1.2.tar.bz2). Extract it, and do the following installation commands:

./automake.sh --prefix=/home/jack/programs/gimp-2.7

make

sudo make install

BUT I encountered more problems along the way:

PROBLEM Got an error message saying I needed ruby

SOLUTION sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

I think at this point babl successfully installed. Back to trying to ./configure gimp, and now we get the following problem:

PROBLEM No package 'gegl' found

SOLUTION Similar to babl, we go to ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gegl and download the latest version, extract it and try to install it with:

./automake.sh --prefix=/home/jack/programs/gimp-2.7

make

sudo make install

But of course we encounter lots of problems:

PROBLEM You must have glib-gettextize installed to compile GEGL

SOLUTION sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev

PROBLEM Loads of errors about GDK and GTK, the first of which was:

gegl-paint.c:22:21: error: gtk/gtk.h: No such file or directory

SOLUTION (Note: this auto-installed LOADS of dependencies for me):
sudo aptitude install libgtk2.0-dev

May also need to execute this next command, but not sure (BEWARE: BIG DOWNLOAD!)

sudo apt-get install asciidoc

Then I was back on track for the main GIMP installation, so tried to run the configure script again (remember the --prefix)...

PROBLEM Checks for TIFF libary failed

SOLUTION sudo apt-get install libtiff4-dev

PROBLEM Could not find Python headers

SOLUTION sudo apt-get install python2.6-dev

PROBLEM Could not find PyGTK 2.10.4 or newer

SOLUTION sudo apt-get install python-gtk2-dev

And then I was able to complete the install!!!! You can then run it using /home/jack/programs/gimp-2.7/bin/gimp-2.7

REFERENCES
http://www.graphics-muse.org/artistsguide/?p=247
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=542219