2012/8/1 Dave Kimble :

On the GIMP home page it says GIMP v2.8 was released on 2012-05-03. On the downloads page it says for Ubuntu use the Ubuntu Software Centre. That only has v2.6.12 .
There doesn't seem to be any other way of getting it.

Google is your friend: try "Ubuntu GIMP 2.8" and you'll get several simple explanations about how to upgrade to GIMP 2.8, depending on your version of Ubuntu.

I want the latest version because various posts indicate the counter-intuitive behaviour of Toolbox Window etc has changed, and it seems pointless to complain if it has already been fixed.

My question on v2.6.12 is: since there are only 3 tools in the Toolbox that I ever use,
and no buttons to bring up the Brightness/Contrast dialog etc, how do I change the contents of Toolbox ? In most apps, for example Firefox, you have View > Toolbars > Customise and can then drag and drop the buttons you use regularly from/to a pool of buttons.

I thought there must be at least a plug-in that does that, because it is so obvious,
but the plug-ins registry doesn't seem to have anything like that under Toolbox or Toolbar.

Am I missing something ?

Yes indeed. Call Image: Edit -> Preferences and choose Toolbox. There you can decide the exact contents of your Toolbox. By the way, it was the same in version 2.6 and even 2.4, and what is this counter-intuitive behaviour you mention?

---- Dave Kimble wrote:

Thanks for your reply.

The downloads page should at least have mentioned that, and given the magic four commands:

Ummm... NO, IT SHOULD NOT. There is nothing "official" about this package at all(I have no problem with it working fine though). Note that the GIMP team does NOT produce binary files at all. If you go to the Downloads page(http://www.gimp.org/downloads/) you will notice that the Windows version is NOT hosted by the official GIMP site but created and hosted by a third party. Likewise when you click the "Show other downloads" link, you will see the very first header and text:

GIMP for Unix-like systems

It's very likely your Unix-like system such as a GNU/Linux distribution already comes with a GIMP package. It is a preferred method of installing GIMP, as the distribution maintainers take care of all the dependencies and bug fix updates.

It is the distro's responsibility to create a package from the source code the GIMP team produces and place into their repository for their users. Debian base systems typically do so on the following major release AFTER a specific project has releasable code. Since GIMP 2.8 went "gold" very close to the time the last Debian release was put out, there was no time to package, test, validate, etc which is why 2.8 is not in those repositories. Debian systems do that to try to maintain a bit of stability since it gives the distro "owners" time to test, wait for high priority bug fixes/patches etc, before something gets into their repositories. If you want to always be on the bleeding edge(and thus have the possibility of more bugs), you should switch to a different distro such as Fedora where new software/updates are pushed out to you fairly quickly(as are bugs in said software in some cases.)

For the record, I used Ubuntu until it switched to Unity(and really, I did try to use it for a year or so) after which I switch to Linux Mint using Gnome 3(better than Unity, but not by much... Mint's Gnome 3 extensions really helped quite a bit though), and am currently using Cinnamon which I quite like overall.

Of course, you ALWAYS have the alternative of downloading the source code and compiling yourself. I have never compiled anything(other than a few java programs), and while it was a tedious process other than one issue(having to do with compiling the gtk+ prerequisite and my drawing tablet not being fully recognized) compiling on Linux was relatively straight forward... the hardest part was tracking down the dependencies(and in some cases, that libraries dependencies). All told, perhaps a few hours of work... but that few hours of work and experience now grant me access to know how to compile future versions of GIMP, including those which are currently in development to be able to test new features that are not as of yet in a release build.

In v2.6.12 Edit > Preferences > Toolbox doesn't seem to offer that feature. Only 3 checkboxes for the Appearance (see attached screenshot) V2.8 has a Tools Configuration section, which is just what I wanted.

"Counter-intuitive" was my polite term for "horrible", but I suppose some people might like it.

Hmm, I am not quite sure what you mean by that(though, it has been a while since I last did this process). Why do you think it's counter-intuitive? Is it because you are from a Windows based system where many applications have a right click menu->popup window to customize the "toolbar"(ala MS Office products) or is there something specific about that preference page that could use some changing? This might be a good topic for a separate email so as to keep things on track and make for easier referencing and searches though...