GIMP for Unix

Getting and Installing GIMP

There are various ways to obtain and install 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 or 2.4 on UNIX. These binaries are provided by GIMP users. We did not test them; use at your own risk.

If you cannot find a pre-compiled package of GIMP 2.4 for your system, you can build and install GIMP from the source code. This is not that hard, so don't be afraid and give it a try.

Requirements

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 GIMP. It runs even on relatively old PCs (Pentium 200) or on old workstations (Sun 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 GIMP on your system:

For the stable version (2.4):

It is recommended that you use packages provided by your distribution whenever possible. If your distribution does not have the required version of one of these packages, see how to build GIMP from sources for a list of required source packages as well as where you can find them.

Note that if you compile and install GIMP from sources, you will need the header files for the required libraries. On some Linux or BSD distributions, 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 GIMP.

Help and Documentation

It is highly recommended that you install the help files (GIMP User Manual) that are provided as a separate package, usually called gimp-help if you install binary packages. The documentation is also available online.

Other useful links can be found at the bottom of each page on this site.