Compiling darktable on Linux Mint Debian Edition 2

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  • 24.01.2016
  • martin

Darktable and RawTherapee are very close competitors and excelent raw processors. Personally I always felt the UI of RawTherapee to be more intuitive, so I just kept using it and only recently realized, Darktable introduced masking features and duplicating of individual modules/filters. Two features filling a gap which made me almost always apply final tweaks to the images using gimp.

Out of the box, Mint Debian provides Darktable 1.4.2. Using backports, you can get Version 1.6.8. With the latest release being 2.0 I decided to compile it from source. As with my other walk throughs, just follow the instructions step by step. Should anything break, leave a comment or contact me. I'll try to help out. 

This instruction is derived from the original darktable documentation. You might have a look there for tipps on how to install from source on other linux distributions.

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Prepare your system

First install all necessary dependencies. On my Mint system I had to add libgtk-3-dev libpugixml-dev in addition to the dependencies listed in the original documentation.

aptitude install intltool libatk1.0-dev libcairo2-dev libsoup2.4-dev libexiv2-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgomp1 libgtk2.0-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff4-dev liblcms2-dev liblensfun-dev libpng12-dev libsqlite3-dev libstdc++6-4.4-dev libxml2-dev libopenexr-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libgphoto2-2-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libgnome-keyring-dev fop librsvg2-dev libflickcurl-dev cmake liblua5.2-dev libcolord-dev libgtk-3-dev libpugixml-dev
 
As with gimp and gmic, I install the self compiled software in ~/bin. To have a clean setup we create a separate directory:
mkdir bin/darktable

Get the source

Go to the darktable repository and download the latest release (2.0 for this tutorial). As stated by the developers: Ensure to download the tar.xz file and none of the auto generated ones.
 
Afterwards unpack it to the newly created directory
cd ~/bin/darktable
tar -xf ~/Downloads/darktable-2.0.0.tar.xf .

Compiling and installing

When compiling the source ensure to give it the correct prefix 
cd ~/bin/darktable/darktable-2.0.0
./build.sh --prefix /home/<username>/bin/darktable
cd ./build; make install
 
Execute ~/bin/darktable/bin/darktable and enjoy.

 

Tags: 
Tutorials for Open Source Photography
darktable