GIMP 2.8 in Ubuntu 12.04

By Mikael Ståldal

This is no longer relevant, since the PPA have updated to GIMP 2.8.10, which has fixed the bug.

If you use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, you only have access to the old GIMP 2.6 in the standard repositories. This is unfortunate since GIMP 2.8 have a lot of new useful features.

The standard way to get GIMP 2.8 is to use the a PPA, as described here. This used to work fine. However, then the PPA upgraded to GIMP 2.8.6, which contains a horrible UI bug (seems like neither the GIMP team, nor the PPA maintainer has any particularly strong QA process).

I find this bug unacceptable, and the PPA has not yet released any new update. So I chose to use GIMP 2.8.4 instead. This is not available from the PPA, so I decided to build it from source.

I found some instructions for building here. However, I was unable to build GEGL since the latest version uses a newer version of a standard library than what is available in Ubuntu 12.04.

Fortunately, you can still use BABL and GEGL from the PPA, and only build GIMP itself from source.

This is what you need to do:

  1. Install the PPA (if you haven’t done so already), but do not install GIMP.
  2. Uninstall any version of GIMP already installed (from standard repository or PPA):
sudo apt-get purge gimp gimp-data gimp-gmic gimp-plugin-registry libgimp2.0 gimp-help-common gimp-help-en gimp-lensfun
  1. Install various dependencies:
sudo apt-get -y build-dep gimp
sudo apt-get purge libgegl-0.0-dev libbabl-0.0-0-dev libgegl-0.0 libbabl-0.0-0
sudo apt-get -y install gegl libgegl-0.2-0 libgegl-dev libbabl-0.1-0 libbabl-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev valac-0.16 graphviz ruby1.9.1-dev liblua5.1-0-dev libopenexr-dev libopenraw-dev libexiv2-dev libsdl1.2-dev libgs-dev libjasper-dev checkinstall
  1. Build GIMP 2.8.4 from source:
cd /tmp
mkdir gimp_build && cd gimp_build
export PATH=/opt/gimp-2.8/bin:$PATH
wget ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/gimp-2.8.4.tar.bz2
tar -xjf gimp-2.8.4.tar.bz2
cd gimp-2.8.4
./configure --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.8
make
sudo make install
  1. Make it possible to launch it from Unity:
cp /opt/gimp-2.8/share/applications/gimp.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

and edit`~/.local/share/applications/gimp.desktop` to include this:

Exec=/opt/gimp-2.8/bin/gimp-2.8 %U
Icon=/opt/gimp-2.8/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/gimp.png

Unfortunately, I have not managed to get the G’MIC GIMP plugin to work.