How-To: Compile and Install GIMP 2.7.0 in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

Ubuntu Jaunty comes by default with GIMP 2.6 included in the repositories, but you can try the latest development version available, which is 2.7.0. This last release is a step forward the next stable GIMP version and contains a lot of user interface improvements and changes, GEGL migration, two new plug-ins to mention the major ones. To compile and install it in Ubuntu, just follow the steps below:

1. Make sure to have the sources repositories enabled
Notice that you can skip this step if you haven't deleted or commented lines out of your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

Edit as root the /etc/apt/sources.list file and make sure to have a line which starts with deb-src, like in the example below (if not, add it and save the file):

deb-src http://ro.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates main restricted

Again, this should be enabled by default. Next, update the package lists:

sudo apt-get update

2. Install the development libraries
Open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get build-dep gimp

This command will fetch and install both the development libraries and the build-essential package needed for the compilation.

3. Get the GIMP source tarball
Download the source code from here, make sure the working directory is the one where you saved it and uncompress it:

tar -xjf gimp-2.7.0.tar.bz2

4. Compile and install GIMP
In the gimp-2.7.0 directory, issue the commands:

./configure
make
sudo make install

The last one with your user password. Notice that you can install it as normal user too, by specifying a prefix in your home directory for example and including the bin directory in your $PATH variable:

./configure --prefix=/home/USER/usr
make
make install

No root privileges needed in this case.