GIMP 2.5.0 has been released and you are curious what’s new? You can compile it yourself and try it out.

But please note: GIMP 2.5.0 is a development version, that means it should only be used for testing and not for production use. Don’t make useless bug reports to the developers.

Basic procedure:

1) Install the necessary packages to compile programs. Make sure gcc, g++, ruby (for the docs), and the development versions of some basic libraries are installed. If one of the “configure” processes below fails because it needs a certain library, install it. For instance, if configure tells you “Can’t find xxx”, install “libxxx-dev”.

2) Download these tarballs from the respective file servers (take the most recent version): BABL, GLib, GEGL, Gtk+, GIMP
ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/glib/2.16/
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gtk+/2.12/

3) Extract BABL, “./configure —prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5”, “make”, “sudo make install”

4) Extract GLib, “./configure —prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5”, “make”, “sudo make install”

5) Make binaries, includes, libraries in /opt/gimp-2.5 available for use:
export PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib/pkgconfig

6) Extract GEGL, “./configure —prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5”, “make”, “sudo make install”

7) Extract Gtk+, “./configure —prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5”, “make”, “sudo make install”

8) Extract GIMP, “configure —prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5”, “make”, “sudo make install”

9) Enjoy with “/opt/gimp-2.5/bin/gimp-2.5”