Installing Gimp 2.2.8 from Source - SuSE 9.3

Date: 8/11/05

SuSE comes with Gimp 2.2.4. At the time of this writing, no binary package for 2.2.8 was available for SuSE 9.3. So, I set off to build it from source.

The Gimp home page states that "this is not that hard, so don't be afraid and give it a try." Yeh! Here's what I had to do to compile from source.

Prerequisites:

A lot of them. Suse 9.3 comes with a lot of linraries pre-installed. but you need a bunch of development libraries. Yast is your friend.

Fortunately, SuSe 9.3 is very up-to-date, so it is a matter of just installing the needed development libraries.

1. Using yast, install gtk-2.4.4-devel. This will automatically install a lot of dependency development libraries, including;

Glib, pango, ATK and Freetype2.

Make sure when the process complates, the FreeType-devel package have been installed.

2. Install the following development libraries usng yast;

libart2-devel
pkg-config-devel
gcc and gcc-devel
c++ and c++-devel
libtiff-devel
libjpeg-devel
librsvg-devel
libgimprint-devel

Yast will take care of any other dependencies, such as zlib-devel. You will see this process as yast installs the packages.

Getting Gimp and the Installation

Now it is time to try the installation.

1. Get Gimp 2.2.8 from the Gimp home page

2. Extract the tarball using the kde file manager to a place of   your choice. For me this was my home directory.

3. Naviagte to the extracted Gimp directory and choose Tools--> open terminal from the file manager.
 
4. Follow the usual installation sequence;

            ./confiure
            make
            (as root user) Make install

5. If the installation completes successfully, you can remove the unecessary files  with "make clean."

You should now be able to invoke Gimp 2.2.8, by going to start-->Graphics-->Image Editing.