sudo apt install distrobox

distrobox create --image quay.io/toolbx/ubuntu-toolbox:16.04 --name ubuntu16

distrobox enter ubuntu16

sudo apt install gimp gimp-data-extras

distrobox-export --app gimp

And now you can use GIMP 2.8.18 like any other program on your system.

This is the same version that is available in Debian 9 (Stretch), so if a Distrobox image for Devuan ASCII existed it could be used instead of the one for Ubuntu 16. Ultimately, I don't think it would make much of a difference for this purpose, but Distrobox images for each Devaun release would be neat for those who want to "keep it in the family".

Ps. I still hate new versions of GIMP. Even after making it look like the old version, several important aspects of my workflow are either outright broken or made to be obnoxiously convoluted. I was always fine with GIMP being its own thing, but I guess those who work on it somehow believe if they made it more like Adobe people will magically choose to use GIMP instead. In my case all they accomplished was alienating a person who spent the better part of a decade learning how to use GIMP the way they created it. I know, "no one cares", but I felt like sharing anyway.

@contrast - The best place to share this AppImage with a larger community would be at https://www.appimagehub.com but unfortunately the requirements for submitting an AppImage there are too strict (the application needs to be compiled on a machine with very ancient glibc, for instance). It's just too much of a hassle.

Hopefully people who want an AppImage of gimp 2.8 will find this thread. I'll leave my tweaked, final version of the AppImage at this link indefinitely:
http://files.dantas.airpost.net/public/ … 4.AppImage

Cheers!

This is the version to use (it actually works), thank you!

I'm not sure why, but I had to extract the data files and link to them, as I did in a previous post, in order for the brushes, gradients, etc to show up. However, the "Filters" menu remains empty, even though GIMP knows to look for them in the /home/rob/bin/gimp/2.0/scripts directory. Is this the case for you as well? If not, any idea what I am doing wrong when running the appimage?

To run the appimage I set it as executable and double click it.

Anyway, thanks again GNUser.

There are fundamental differences in the way GIMP 2.10 handles several important functions that I used all the time, such as moving layers or selections that are behind other layers - in 2.8 it's possible to grab/move layers/elections that are behind other layers, while in 2.10 it's not. I literally can't do my work without that functionality. There are other things that also don't work properly anymore, where "properly" is the precedent set by over a decade of they worked in GIMP.

Good for you if you like GIMP 2.10, but there's absolutely no purpose for you to say so in this thread. It's like coming to this forum to post, "Debian works for me". It adds nothing to the conversation.

This is not true...

You can decide if working on the active layer or to have the autoselect mode activated and move any layer is clicked by the mouse, this is the default behavior since 2.6

Good for you if you like GIMP 2.10, but there's absolutely no purpose for you to say so in this thread. It's like coming to this forum to post, "Debian works for me". It adds nothing to the conversation.

Hopefully people who want an AppImage of gimp 2.8 will find this thread. I'll leave my tweaked, final version of the AppImage at this link indefinitely:
http://files.dantas.airpost.net/public/ … 4.AppImage

Cheers!

1. At root of AppDir there is gimp.desktop. Change its Exec line from this:

Exec=gimp-2.8 %U

To this:

Exec=gimp-2.8-wrapper %U

2. Create (and mark as executable) AppDir/usr/bin/gimp-2.8-wrapper with this in it:

#!/bin/sh

dir=/tmp/gimp2.8-plugins

if [ ! -d "$dir" ]; then
	mkdir -p "$dir"
	HERE="$(dirname "$(readlink -f "${0}")")"
	cp -r "$HERE"/../lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins "$dir"
fi

export GIMP2_PLUGINDIR="$dir" 
exec gimp-2.8 "$@"

Create AppImage from the tweaked AppDir. Now the AppImage works perfectly. Thanks again, Tatwi!

EDIT: I cleaned up the wrapper script a bit.

When I select File -> Open, no files show up in the file selection window unless I choose "All files". Then, whatever image file I select (even a common format such as jpeg) I get an error window saying "Unknown file type".

Alas, I don't know enough about how GIMP/GTK file selection works to fix this.

Hi, Tatwi. I use an AppImage of GIMP 2.10.8 but, like you, I'm unhappy with the recent changes.
Can you please share your AppImage of GIMP 2.8.x for 64-bit?

I stuck a copy of it in my Google Drive here,

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_fe5z5 … sp=sharing

It turned out that the paths to the various bits of GIMP needed to made absolute rather than relative. As such, I moved from using the compressed AppImage file to the plain AppImage folder, which I stuck in my home directory.

For example, the default path that is set relative to the AppImage doesn't work,

../../usr/lib/gimp/2.0/modules

where as the full path does work,

/home/rob/bin/GIMP-2.8.10/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/modules

These paths can be set using the Edit > Preferences > Folders UI or by editing the file ~/.gimp-2.8/gimprc.

So as a full run-down on how to make GIMP 2.8 work in Devuan Beowulf:

1. Clone pkg2appimage and install its dependencies.

2. Build the GIMP AppImage.

bash -ex ./pkg2appimage recipes/gimp.yml

3. Copy (and rename) the GIMP.AppDir, which contains all the files needed to run GIMP 2.8, to somewhere useful on you drive, such as /opt/gimp.

4. Edit the gimp.desktop file so that can find the gimp executable.

Exec=/opt/gimp/bin/GIMP-2.8.10/usr/bin/gimp-2.8

5. Open GIMP by running /opt/gimp/AppImage and close it again. This will create all the files in /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8, one of which you'll edit in the next step.

6. Set the paths in the /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/gimprc file.

(plug-in-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/plug-ins:/opt/gimp/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins")
(module-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/modules:/opt/gimp/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/modules")
(interpreter-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/interpreters:/opt/gimp/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/interpreters")
(environ-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/environ:/opt/gimp/usr/lib/gimp/2.0/environ")
(brush-path "/opt/gimp/usr/share/gimp/2.0/brushes:/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/brushes")
(brush-path-writable "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/brushes")
(dynamics-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/dynamics:/opt/gimp/usr/share/gimp/2.0/dynamics")
(dynamics-path-writable "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/dynamics")
(pattern-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/patterns:/opt/gimp/usr/share/gimp/2.0/patterns")
(pattern-path-writable "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/patterns")
(palette-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/palettes:/opt/gimp/usr/share/gimp/2.0/palettes")
(palette-path-writable "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/palettes")
(gradient-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/gradients:/opt/gimp/usr/share/gimp/2.0/gradients")
(gradient-path-writable "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/gradients")
(tool-preset-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/tool-presets:/opt/gimp/usr/share/gimp/2.0/tool-presets")
(tool-preset-path-writable "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/tool-presets")
(font-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/fonts:/opt/gimp/usr/share/gimp/2.0/fonts")
(theme-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/themes:/opt/gimp/usr/share/gimp/2.0/themes")
(script-fu-path "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/.gimp-2.8/scripts:/opt/gimp/usr/share/gimp/2.0/scripts")

7. Add menu entry for GIMP 2.8 (using menulibre) where the executable points to /opt/gimp/AppRun.

You can copy this personal menu file, located in /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.local/share/applications/menulibre-gimp-2.desktop to the system folder /usr/share/applications, so that it's available to all users.

8. Go forth and create with the best version of GIMP!

I wasn't able to compile any version of GIMP 2.8 directly in Beowulf, due to incompatible gimp related libraries.

However, using my Devuan ASCII desktop, I was able to create an AppImage of GIMP 2.8.10 from Debian Jessie packages using a modified version of the gimp pkg2appimage.

Everything works in the AppImage, except the filters and the fact that I had to manually copy the content of /usr/share/gimp/2.0/ from the AppImage to  ~/.gimp-2.8/ for the brushes, etc. to work. I get the same result when running the completed AppImage as well as when running it from its source directory.

I logged the program output to file and it produced the following messages,

/home/rob/.gimp-2.8/themerc:7: Unable to find include file: "././share/gimp/2.0/themes/Default/gtkrc"
GIMP-Warning: Bad binary format string in interpreter file ././lib/gimp/2.0/interpreters/pygimp.interp

(gimp-2.8:5185): Gimp-Core-CRITICAL **: gimp_brush_generated_load: assertion 'g_path_is_absolute (filename)' failed

....

Where .... is an equivalent message for every file it couldn't find for the plugins, etc.

Here's the modified AppImage "recipe" that I used,

app: GIMP
binpatch: true

ingredients:
  dist: jessie
  sources:
    - deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie main
  pretend:
    - libcups2 1.7.2-0ubuntu1

script:
  - mv ./usr/lib/libblas/* usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
  - mv ./usr/lib/lapack/* ./usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
  - sed -i -e 's|././/||g' usr/lib/gimp/2.0/interpreters/pygimp.interp
  - sed -i -e 's|^Name=.*|Name=GIMP|g' gimp.desktop

It seems to me that the error,  Unable to find include file: "/home/rob/.gimp-2.8/themerc:7: ././share/gimp/2.0/themes/Default/gtkrc is the cause of missing filters, etc. I have no idea what "themerc:7" refers to and when I checked the files inside the AppImage, gtkrc and all the others are indeed where they're supposed to be.

Normally I am pretty good at debugging these kinds of things in software, but I'm not seeing the solution to this one. Any help here would be awesome, I've never used pkg2appimage before. There may be a Python related issue or may just be a path problem. I'm entirely sure.

Thanks!