In June 2012 Bluefish 2.2.3 was released, a worthy upgrade that is not yet available in the regular Ubuntu Repositories. This mini-guide demonstrates how to build this version from source under the newest release version of Ubuntu and has been tested most recently under Ubuntu Precise Pangolin. Discussion thread for this wiki can be found here

Building Bluefish

There are several steps that I would advise should be best followed in sequence and a starting step is to remove the repository version:

Remove the repository version

First check that you have a perhaps older version of Bluefish installed:

andrew@skamandros~$ bluefish --version
Bluefish Editor 2.2.2
Visit us at http://bluefish.openoffice.nl

and if this is the case simply remove it as follows:

sudo apt-get remove bluefish

and then move on to downloading some building tools and dependencies:

Download compiling tools and dependencies

You will need some compilers, a nice installation application called checkinstall and suitable 'development' libraries:

sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall libart-2.0-dev libaspell-dev \
libbonobo2-dev libbonoboui2-dev libgail-dev libgnome-keyring-dev libgnome2-dev \
libgnomecanvas2-dev libgnomeui-dev libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libpopt-dev \
libgucharmap-2-90-dev libenchant-dev intltool

Finally to download the source code, compile and install it:

Download and build Bluefish

This following code block downloads, compiles and install Bluefish 2.2.3. Checkinstall builds a neat package that integrates into the Ubuntu package management system:

mkdir -pv $HOME/bluefish_build && cd $HOME/bluefish_build && \
wget http://www.bennewitz.com/bluefish/stable/source/bluefish-2.2.3.tar.bz2 && \
tar xjvf bluefish-2.2.3.tar.bz2 && cd bluefish-2.2.3 && \
./configure && make && \
mkdir -vp doc-pak && \
cp -v AUTHORS ChangeLog COPYING INSTALL README doc-pak && \
sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no --pakdir "$HOME/bluefish_build" --backup=no \
  --deldoc=yes --deldesc=yes --delspec=yes --default --pkgversion "2.2.3" && \
make distclean

This gives you the newest version of this great editor and I wish you all the best with the websites you will be building with the latest version of Bluefish!

And in conclusion...

This guide aims to follow the latest release version of Bluefish matched to the latest release version of Ubuntu. Feel free to log in to the wiki and update this page as required!