Patrick Micka

HowTo: Inkscape 0.47

How To, Linux, Ubuntu

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I love Inkscape, it’s no secret. Most of the images in my portfolio were created using Inkscape. It has a clean interface, just the right tools to do what I want, and it’s free. I prefer it over any other available vector image editing program out there so I jumped at installing the newest release when it was made available. Some great new features include timed autosaves, spell check, better PS and EPS export. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu repositories don’t contain this version yet. On the bright side, installing 0.47 is a breeze using the apt-get build-dep function to install everything needed to put you on the path to vector editing zen.

First, make sure you’ve removed/uninstalled any previous version of Inkscape on your system and check that you’ve installed the build-essential package via apt-get. Once that’s all taken care of you should be good to go.

Next, to grab a copy of 0.47:

cd ~/Desktop
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/inkscape/inkscape-0.47.tar.bz2

You can extract it with the following terminal command:

tar xvjf ~/Desktop/inkscape-0.47.tar.bz2

Before moving forward you’ll need to install all the dependencies by entering the line below (please note that this does not install the package ‘inkscape’):

sudo apt-get build-dep inkscape

After that’s done you should have everything you need to finish the installation. We’ll change directories and then finish with three final commands:

cd ~/Desktop/inkscape-0.47/

./configure

Once that’s finished:

make

And lastly:

sudo make install

That should take care of it.