Howto compile the Gimp 2.8.6 in Ubuntu

GIMP, one of the greatest open-source apps, recently released version 2.8.6. but there are no ppa with the latest version available just yet. In this tutorial we will compile 2.8.6 from source.

First we will remove previous gimp version otherwise you will get the error below:

Libgimp version mismatch! The GIMP binary cannot run with a libgimp version other than its own. This is GIMP 2.8.6, but the libgimp version is 2.8.4. Maybe you have GIMP versions in both /usr and /usr/local ?

Remove gimp by running sudo apt-get purge gimp and sudo apt-get autoremove to remove all now unneeded packages used by gimp.

Dependencies

Now, to compile an application, you need its dependencies - libraries the application requires - because gimp is also in the Ubuntu repositories(Older version of gimp) so are its dependencies. One can install them by invoking the build-dep command in the gnome-terminal like so: sudo apt-get build-dep gimp

GIMP also uses xvfb and it will give a xvfb NO message when done compiling, nothing critical is missing but this is an optional feature. Xvfb is an X11 server that performs all graphical operations in memory, not showing any screen output. sudo apt-get install xvfb-run

From source

download the latest gimp wget ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/gimp-2.8.6.tar.bz2, extract it:

Copy/paste the codes below to compile GIMP:

Gimp Plugins

When u have removed gimp*, and compiled it from source, you will see that some plugins are not available. Like one of my favorites the Heal Selection, is not available. Simply sudo apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry did not work for me. To get all of your favorites feature back. Download, the gimp-plugin-registry .deb file. Extract the content from the .deb file, in the directory: gimp-plugin-registry_5.20121030-1ubuntu0ppa9~precise_amd64.deb/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins/ and copy it in ~/.gimp-2.8/plug-ins after that, all of your features are returned.

Features list

• Customizable Interface
• Photo Enhancement
• Digital Retouching
• Hardware Support
• File Formats
• Multi platform support: Linux/Windows/Mac/Sun Opensolaris/FreeBSD
• Painting
  • Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
  • Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
  • Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
  • Supports custom brushes and patterns
• System
  • Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
  • Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time
• Advanced Manipulation
  • Full alpha channel support
  • Layers and channels
  • Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
  • Editable text layers
  • Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
  • Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
  • Foreground extraction tool
  • Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
  • Transformable paths, transformable selections.
  • Quickmask to paint a selection.
• Extensible
  • A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
  • Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
  • Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
  • Over 100 plug-ins already available
• Animation
  • Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
  • MNG support
  • Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
  • Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
  • Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
• File Handling
  • File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
  • Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
  • SVG path import/export

And much much much more; For a complete lists of feature see gimp.org/features/, gimp.org/introduction, registy.gimp.org/, and gimp.org/tutorials

Have fun