CompilingUbuntu
Hardy and Intrepid
Consider using stable
This is a short how to build the latest svn version. Please note that SVN version may be buggy and crash often. This is released for people who want to help testing or need the very latest features. If you are not of developer kind, you are suggested to install the stable version from the repositories using Synaptic or from command line:
sudo apt-get install inkscape
Using prebuilt packages
For Ubuntu there is developers repository available with prebuilt Inkscape which is updated occassionally. You should append the following lines to file /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/inkscape.testers/ubuntu gutsy main
Run following commands to update the repository information and install all the latest programs available.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
To install Inkscape, do the usual
sudo apt-get install inkscape
Compiling unstable developement version
Installing dependencies
If you are sure you can face Inkscape being unstable, then please continue reading. First you should install all the dependencies. This can be done by:
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake intltool \ libglib2.0-dev libpng12-dev libgc-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms1-dev \ libgtkmm-2.4-dev libxslt1-dev libboost-dev libpopt-dev libgsl0-dev
Now you should have every dependency you need to build Inkscape.
Additional dependencies
If you want to have optional features you may need to install some more packages:
sudo apt-get install libgnome-vfsmm-2.6-dev libssl-dev libmagick++9-dev libwpg-dev
Getting source from SVN
You have to fetch the source from subversion (SVN). If you have not subversion installed, install it:
sudo apt-get install subversion
After this you can fetch the latest source. This creates a new directory named inkscape into your current working directory.
svn checkout https://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/inkscape/inkscape/trunk inkscape
If you want to learn more about subversion, feel free to do so: http://inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/WorkingWithSVN
Configuring and Compiling
Enter the newly created inkscape directory.
cd inkscape
As you may have already noticed this folder contains some files with all CAPITAL letters like README, INSTALL, HACKING, COPYING and probably others. These contain the latest information about how to build the program. The README file says that if you have no configure script in the current directory you should run autogen script to create it:
./autogen.sh
Now run configure script which detects your system variables, installed software etc.:
./configure
or, if you want to make it install to an alternate location so that you can keep the standard version installed and untouched
./configure --prefix=/home/yourname/opt/local
(replacing "yourname" with your actual directory user name, of course)
All bug reporting testers may find it useful to install to use --prefix=/home/yourname/opt/inkscape-revision-19900 or --prefix=/opt/inkscape-19900 or something similar, replacing the revision number with correct one (this is shown when svn fetching finishes, also can be found in file .svn/entries). This way you can have several versions of inkscape installed at once.
or, if you want to have inkboard enabled,
./configure --enable-inkboard
If the configure script ends with no error messages, you are the lucky one, all system requirements are met. Run make to compile.
make
This may take some time, probably hours, depending on your machine's speed. On 1,4Ghz P3M with 512Mb it took 32 minutes.
Installing
You can continue by installing using "make install" (not recommended, as debian package manager would know nothing about new package) or using checkinstall. If checkinstall is not installed, you can install it the usual way "sudo apt-get install checkinstall".
sudo checkinstall
Happy inkscapeing.
Fix no icons problem
If you run this and you find that you have no tool icons it's because it's looking in the wrong place for them. To fix that you need to make a symbolic link to the correct location. Here is an example:
sudo ln -s /usr/share/inkscape /usr/local/share/inkscape
Update your version
If you want to update your already built inkscape to the very latest version, you need to run following commands in inkscape source directory. Please correct the configure line and use the same installation method as on first install.
svn update ./configure --prefix=/home/''yourname''/opt/local make make install
Dapper and Edgy
If you're going to build Inkscape, you'll need to have a full complement of build requirements. This is very easy to do in Ubuntu Dapper and Edgy:
Note: the libgc-6.7 that is available in Edgy removes the need for the following:
sudo apt-get build-dep inkscape sudo apt-get install liblcms-dev build-essential echo "deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get source libgc-dev sudo apt-get install fakeroot debhelper cd libgc* sudo fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us sudo dpkg -i ../libgc*.deb
If you want version 0.44 from Debian Unstable, you can compile it in the same way as libgc above:
apt-get source inkscape cd inkscape* fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us sudo dpkg -i ../inkscape*.deb
To build the SVN snapshots:
# Untar and navigate to the inkscape source folder ./configure make sudo make install
Instead of doing "make install", on Debian-based distributions (such as Ubuntu) it is better to do
sudo checkinstall
since checkinstall first builds the .deb package and then installs it, thus making the package system aware of the newly installed inkscape. If you get the "command not found" message, do
sudo apt-get install checkinstall
Notes:
build-dep gets all the dependencies for the version of Inkscape that comes with Ubuntu. We're not building the same version, but most of the dependencies are the same.
libcms-dev was required for ./configure to work
This was done on a recently installed Dapper (Ubuntu 6.06) system. I built Inkscape version 0.44.
The following packages are need to compile cvs inkscape under a default Ubuntu Hoary/Breezy/Dapper system:
apt-get install cvs build-essential intltool libtool libgtkmm-2.4-dev \ libglib2.0-dev libpng12-dev libxslt1-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libpopt-dev libgc-dev
Inkscape requires libgc-6.7.
Breezy uses 6.4, Dapper uses 6.6, Edgy uses 6.7
Hoary uses version 6.3, which is provided in the Repos. (Is there somewhere to get a .deb for 6.4?)
To overwrite libgc-6.3 with libgc-6.4:
Download gc6.4 ./configure --prefix=/usr make sudo make install
Old libgc 6.5 debs for Breezy
http://inkscape.modevia.com/ap/libgc-dev_6.5-1_i386.deb http://inkscape.modevia.com/ap/libgc1_6.5-1_i386.deb