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GIMP for Unix

Getting and Installing the GIMP

There are various ways to obtain and install the GIMP for Unix systems. In addition to the source code distribution here on www.gimp.org, you can get binaries for various flavors of Unix.

At the moment we know about the following binary packages for GIMP 2.2 on Unix. These binaries are provided by GIMP users. We did not test them; use at your own risk.

• GNU/Linux
  • Debian testing (deb)
  • Debian unstable (deb)
  • Fedora Core 3 (RPM)
  • SuSE 9.2 (RPM)
  • Gentoo Portage
  • Slackware
• BSD
  • FreeBSD
• Sun Solaris
  • Blastwave Software Distribution

If you cannot find a pre-compiled package of GIMP 2.2 for your system, you can build and install the GIMP from the source code. This is not that hard, so don't be afraid and give it a try.

Requirements

The GIMP runs on most Unix systems using X11 (the X Window System). If your system can run a graphical web browser, chances are that it can also run the GIMP. It runs even on relatively old PCs (Pentium 200) or on old workstations (Ultra1). The amount of memory can be an important factor, especially if you intend to work on large images. A minimum of 128 MB of RAM is recommended, but actually you should have 256 MB or more, and several GB does not hurt when you want to edit really large images. In addition to the basic X11 libraries, the following is a list of what you will need to run the GIMP on your system:

For the stable version (2.2):

• A recent version of pkg-config is needed and you can grab them at http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig/
• GTK+ 2.4.4 or better (Gimp Toolkit). The GIMP toolkit can be found at ftp://ftp.gtk.org/ GTK+ 2.4.4 also needs the following packages. (Either the version listed or newer)
  • GLib 2.4.5
  • Pango 1.4.0
  • ATK
• PangoFT2 a Pango backend that uses FreeType2 (Make sure you have FreeType2 installed before installing Pango). Downloads can be found at http://www.freetype.org/
• libart2 Grab the module libart_lgpl out of GNOME CVS or fetch the tarball from ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/libart_lgpl/

Note that if you compile and install the GIMP from sources, you will need the header files for the required libraries. On some Linux systems, these header files are usually included in a separate package using the suffix -devel. So for example, you will need the packages gtk and gtk-devel if you want to build the GIMP.

Help and Documentation

• GIMP Documentation