Perl Graphics Programming

Getting and Installing the Gimp

The Gimp is free software, covered by the GNU Public License. You can download the program and libraries and use them for free, but you should read and understand the license if you plan on redistributing the Gimp or reusing any of the code covered by the GPL.

There are a number of ways of getting the Gimp. The main FTP site is ftp://ftp.gimp.org, which also lists 20 or so mirror sites around the world. The Gimp home page is at http://www.gimp.org. A wide array of online information and resources is available, some of which is listed on the Gimp home page.

The Gimp installs easily on most Unix systems. There is a port available for Mac OS X, OS/2, and Win32 systems. The Win32 port is not supported directly by the core Gimp development team, and it requires an X Server and a number of supporting DLLs to operate.

You can also grab a binary image from the binaries subdirectory of the main FTP site. These are available as Debian packages, RPM packages, and a dynamically linked, precompiled binary for Solaris. Binaries are also available for other platforms. However, you still need the source code in order to compile the Gimp-Perl modules.

Installing the Gimp

Before you can build and install the Gimp, you’ll need to assemble the following:

The GTK libraries

GTK is the stylish widget set that the Gimp uses for its GUI. You must install GTK before you install the Gimp. The latest stable version of the GTK toolkit should be available at ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gtk ...