davehayes.org

Those of us using Gutsy were lucky enough to get a peek at the GIMP 2.4 release candidates during testing. Now that Gutsy is out, and GIMP 2.4.1 has been released, we’re still stuck on that old 2.4.0~rc3 release.

If you want to run the latest version, there are several ways to go about it. You could just download the source and do the standard ./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install, but then our package management wouldn’t be aware of the new files and we could run into some trouble down the road. But we don’t want to wait for an official .deb (which could come as late as April ’08), so it looks like we’ll have to make our own. This is actually very easy, here’s what you do…

First off, we need to make a directory in which we can work, and then enter it like so:

mkdir ~/Projects
mkdir ~/Projects/gimp
cd ~/Projects/gimp

If you get an error like “mkdir: cannot create directory `/home/dhayes/Projects’: File exists
“, you can just ignore it. We’re also going to need a couple packages, so let’s make sure they’re installed.

sudo apt-get install fakeroot devscripts

Now, we need to get the source package for the current version of GIMP in Gutsy (which is 2.4.0~rc3). We do that like this…

apt-get source gimp

That command will probably take a while to finish (for me it was about 15 to 20 minutes), so go get a cup of coffee or watch a couple episodes of Squidbillies while you wait. When it finishes, we’re going to need several development libraries to be able to successfully compile the GIMP, and we can use this command to make sure we get everything we need:

sudo apt-get build-dep gimp

You probably have time to watch another episode of Squidbillies while this one is going. Now, once that’s done, we need to get the source code for the new version. We’ll just use wget to download it.

wget ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.4/gimp-2.4.1.tar.bz2

Again, this might take a couple minutes. Once that’s finished, we need to enter the old package’s source directory and tell the system where the new source code is.

cd gimp-2.4.0~rc3
uupdate -u ../gimp-2.4.1.tar.bz2

Once that finishes, we can change to the new package directory.

cd ../gimp-2.4.1

Now, we just have one more tiny little thing to do before we can build the package. The older Ubuntu package contains a patch that fixes a bug which no longer exists in the newer version. Therefore, before we can build the package, we need to remove that older patch. Here’s how we do that:

rm debian/patches/04_ubunut_bug_148380_upstream_fix.patch

Now we just need to build the package.

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

Now just kick back, watch a couple more episodes of Squidbillies and wait for that bad boy to compile. When it finishes, you’ll have some nice shiny new .debs that we can install like so:

cd ..
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

And that’s it! Bask in the goodness of the GIMP 2.4.1!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 2:27 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.