Inkscape fails to install on 14.04

Question

I am trying to install Inkscape on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS using apt-get. After a seemingly successful installation, I cannot seem to run Inkscape. I get the following terminal output:

    matt@linuxDesk:/$ sudo apt-get install inkscape
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree       
    Reading state information... Done
    inkscape is already the newest version.
    0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded.
    matt@linuxDesk:/$ inkscape
    The program 'inkscape' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
    sudo apt-get install inkscape

I have a second computer, also running Ubuntu 14.04, and I was able to install and run Inkscape on that computer without issue. I ran

    find /usr -name inkscape

on the computer with the working install, and the command returned a huge number of files. Running the same command on the computer with the broken install yields:

    /usr/lib/mime/packages/inkscape
    /usr/share/menu/inkscape
    /usr/share/doc/inkscape

This suggests to me that apt-get thinks that Inkscape is installed, but then for some reason only installs some of the files. I've tried completely wiping Inkscape from the computer and starting over using:

    sudo apt-get purge inkscape
    sudo apt-get autoremove

These commands did not seem to remove all inkscape files, so I even tried going in and removing them manually. Still to no avail.

After trying various permutations of the above, I attempted to install from source. I (think) that I got all of the dependencies, and ./configure runs fine. Unfortunately running the makefile fails:

    matt@linuxDesk:~/Downloads/inkscape-0.48.4$ make
    make  all-recursive
    make[1]: Entering directory `/home/matt/Downloads/inkscape-0.48.4'
    Making all in src
    make[2]: Entering directory `/home/matt/Downloads/inkscape-0.48.4/src'
      CXX    desktop.o
    In file included from desktop.cpp:91:0:
    widgets/desktop-widget.h:242:32: error: stray ‘,’ at end of member declaration
         GtkWidget *commands_toolbox,;
                                    ^
    make[2]: *** [desktop.o] Error 1
    make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/matt/Downloads/inkscape-0.48.4/src'
    make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
    make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/matt/Downloads/inkscape-0.48.4'
    make: *** [all] Error 2
    matt@linuxDesk:~/Downloads/inkscape-0.48.4$ 

Any suggestions would be much appreciated - I'm quite out of ideas. Thanks!

Answer 1

Figured it out. The problem was that I had added a PPA that was no good. I don't fully understand how they work, but my guess is that it was essentially pointing the apt-get inkscape commands to the wrong place. I went in and deleted this PPA using the following commands:

    cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
    sudo rm inkscape*

After doing that I ran the following commands to uninstall and reinstall inkscape:

    sudo apt-get purge inkscape
    sudo apt-get clean
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install inkscape

Now running the command inkscape in terminal opens Inkscape correctly.

Answer 2

Run these commands to quickly and easily install the Inkscape snap package from the terminal in all currently supported versions of Ubuntu, including 14.04. This has the added advantage that you can get the very latest Inkscape on Ubuntu 14.04.

Install Inkscape

sudo apt install snapd sudo snap install inkscape

Answer 3

I don't know exactly the problem, but you can try these general troubleshooting steps:

General APT command for repairing broken installs:

sudo apt-get -f install

In case you have a corrupt .dpkg or out of data repository:

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get update

Purge and reinstall inkscape:

sudo apt-get purge inkscape
sudo apt-get install inkscape

During the above install, watch carefully for all messages which may indicate a problem.

Reconfigure inkscape

sudo dpkg-reconfigure inkscape