How to install myPaint 0.9.0 on LinuxMint 8 (Helena)

Lately I've been trying to use LinuxMint "Julia" then LinuxMint Debian Edition (lmde) - but even if both newest releases have great improvement (both in design and features), on my old pc nothing can beat LinuxMint 8 (helena) because the newest version are too resources demanding - that's mainly the reason I'm sticking with the old version.


Now there was something that kept tempting me to upgrade, it's the new release of myPaint 0.9.0 which brings great new features : faster saving, importing a new set of brushes, naming layers, and the "tab" key to hide everything but the drawing - compared to the old version of myPaint (0.8.0 the release available in LinuxMint 8) which looks a bit of a mess.


But updating the whole system just for one application ... well, was probably a bit drastic.

Anyway, with my previous experience in Linux Debian (and from the help of a very knowledgeable former colleague) I knew there was a way to download and compile from the latest source directly.

But the challenge as a non-developer is to understand the jargon and actually try it ... Luckily for me, mypaint has an irc channel and they were really helpful.

The whole process of compiling and running was done in less than 15mn.

1. Download and extract the source
2. open the terminal and install missing package by : sudo apt-get install g++ python-dev libglib2.0-dev python-numpy swig scons gettext libpng12-dev
3. go into the extracted source directory and type : scons && ./mypaint which will build and then launch mypaint 0.9.0 
4. later I installed the mypaint program in /usr/local/bin - by typing : sudo scons prefix=/usr/local install and after that step I changed the path to all menus to match the new location