Some time ago I blogged about compiling Inkscape on Windows. Guess what? I couldn’t do it.  :(  I tried over and over again on several occasions and I just couldn’t get it to compile. I gave up on it and just resorted to the compiled version that was already compiled for us and ready to download.

I was still interesting in the black art of compiling Inkscape though. This time I turned to my trusty Ubuntu Hardy desktop at home. I got all of the dependencies installed (I think…can never be too sure) and away I went. Unfortunately it errored out during the make command. I tried only a couple of times after that and still nothing. I failed again.

This morning when I got into work I felt that itch to try and compile Inkscape again. Until I can compile it successfully it’s going to keep bothering me. So I VNC’ed into my Ubuntu Hardy file server (it’s just  light duty server…nothing I couldn’t fix if I broke it) and installed all of the dependencies. I pretty much followed the Inkscape/Ubuntu Hardy compiling instructions from the Inkscape wiki ,only changing a few things. This time I was successful. Hooray! The only problem that I had was that I could not build a deb package with checkinstall command. I did a standard make install instead and sent it to a different directory so that I could use both the stable build and the SVN build (19107).

My only question is if it’s possible to copy or transfer my the install (compiled package) to another Ubuntu Hardy PC…like to my home desktop. Had I been able to make the deb package then this would have been awesome but I wasn’t able to. I would love to give this to other Ubuntu Hardy users who are interested in taking a look at the new features. Unfortunately, I’m a packaging noob.