Building Krita 3.0 for lazy cats

This guide only applies to Ubuntu 15.10 and 16.04 (and maybe other up-to-date debian derivatives).

So you are wanting to build Krita from scratch, but don't want all the headache of figuring out paths to installed software that you might or might not have, or figuring out which packages you need? Well, here is a guide to build Krita from a completely fresh Ubuntu install, so you are sure to get it working after following all steps. I hope this guide is useful to people who experience issues with other guides.

The first thing we need to do is make sure our package manager is aware of all the newest updates. Then we download all the required packages for the whole process.

Now we set up our building folder structure. We need a base installation directory, which we set in the first line. Currently, it is set to make a folder called Krita in your home directory, if you want it anywhere else, change the path of the first command and the rest of the commands are still valid. In the base directory we make 4 folders (b, d, i, build). Here is a short explanation what they are for:

• b - Used to build Krita dependencies
• d - Used to download Krita dependencies
• build - Used to build Krita
• i - Used to install Krita and its dependencies

Krita uses the Qt framework for its user interface. We could install Qt directly into our Ubuntu, but sometimes it's better to have a contained portable installation. This is especially useful because Krita might upgrade Qt versions every so often, so you can easily rerun part of this tutorial to build with a different version of Qt. So we are going to build it ourselves. Luckily, it is quite straight-forward.

In addition to Qt, Krita has several other dependencies that we can automatically resolve once we have the source code, so let's download that from Git. This will create another folder called krita in our base installation directory, and it will contain the source code.

Krita has a couple of dependencies we can resolve automatically, this is why we have a b and d folder.

Now we can build and run Krita.


If you followed all the steps, you should now have a working Krita build. Let me know down below whether this worked for you :)