Run the original GIMP
This project repackages the historical GIMP 0.54.1 from 1996 as a Flatpak that runs on a modern Linux machine.
What is this?
GIMP was first announced on November 21, 1995. No source survives from those very first versions; a few small releases followed, and a few months later, on February 12, 1996, came GIMP 0.54.1 — the earliest release that still exists as buildable source code. It was also the last one built on Motif.
Around this time Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball got fed up with Motif — it was proprietary software — and decided to write their own toolkit, GTK. Building out GTK and rebuilding GIMP on it took a long while to reach a usable state, and in the meantime 0.54 was what most people actually used: distributions shipped it, users found it useful, and a community of users and developers grew up around it. Famously, the original Linux Tux mascot was drawn in 0.54.
That carried on for a year and a half or two years until GIMP 0.99.x finally got stable enough (still a beta!) and the community moved over.
While 0.54 was missing plenty of features that came later (no layers, for one), it shipped with a plug-in system at its core from day one — which made it easy for the early community to tinker with and extend to fill the gaps themselves. A surprising number of tutorials and 3rd-party plug-ins have been written — many of which you'll (hopefully soon) find on this website and in the Flatpak. I had quite some fun reading through and following some of these older tutorials, and maybe you will too!
If you're interested in the full(er) backstory of GIMP's early years, there is a nice article on the project's website which is worth a read.
Get it running
The easiest way is to grab the Flatpak bundle and install it. On most Linux distributions you should be able to just double-click the downloaded file:
Download gimp-0.54.1-10.flatpak
If you prefer the terminal or your Software Center app doesn't support Flatpak bundles, install it with the command line:
flatpak install --user gimp-0.54.1-10.flatpakOnce it's installed you'll find GIMP 0.54 in your application launcher. You can also start it from a terminal:
flatpak run io.github.balooii.gimp054xorg-fonts-* on Arch or
xorg-x11-fonts-* on Fedora) sorts it out.
.gbr files. On its first run it creates a brushes directory
at ~/.var/app/io.github.balooii.gimp054/data/brushes/. Drop
any .gbr file in there and restart GIMP — the brush will
then show up in the brush selection dialog.
A few things to know
This is beta software from 1996 and it behaves like it. For one, the effects live behind a right-click on the canvas — you won't find them in the main menu. But figuring out where the edges are is honestly half the fun.
Documentation back then was almost non-existent, so people discussed on the mailing list and wrote and shared tutorials on their websites. Some are restored on this website and I would suggest reading them to help you along but also to see what folks managed to pull off with these tools. Start with the tutorials and you'll pick it up quickly.
One obvious disclaimer: this is decades-old code. Even though it's built against modern, up-to-date dependencies, don't treat it as something to open untrusted files with or expose to anything important. Run it for the fun and the history, not as your daily image editor. :)
Oh, and did I mention that GIMP is still kicking and you can download the latest version here?