Installing Blender for Linux

Package Manager

Install

The easiest method to install Blender is to use your package manager.  The details here will vary with your distribution, but basically you simply start your package manager (e.g. Synaptic) search for "Blender", mark it for installation, and click "Apply".

Run

Find the install location and run Blender, or run from command line.

blender

Errors

If you encounter any errors when trying to run Blender, see Errors at the bottom of this page.

Manual Install

Download

Download Blender from either the Blender downloads page, or to use the same version used on in the demonstrations on this site, download the local copy of Blender 2.45 based on your CPU (32-bit or 64-bit), and your Python version.

• Blender 2.45 for Python 2.4
• Blender 2.45 for Python 2.5
• 64-bit Blender 2.45 for Python 2.4
• 64-bit Blender 2.45 for Python 2.5

To determine your Python version:

python -V

Extract

In your GUI right click the file and select "extract here", or if running from a console using Blender 2.45 for Python 2.4 on 32-bit systems:

tar -xf blender-2.45-linux-glibc236-py24-i386.tar.bz2

Move

After extracting, you need to copy the ".blender" directory to your home directory.

cd blender-2.45-linux-glibc236-py24-i386
cp -r .blender ~

Run

Run Blender by clicking it, or from a console change to the directory where you extracted Blender and run "blender":

./blender

Errors

If you encounter any errors when trying to run Blender, see Errors at the bottom of this page.

Errors

If you get an error when attempting to run, you may be missing some libraries which you must install.  For example if you are missing libopenal on a Debian based system:

$ ./blender
./blender: error while loading shared libraries: libopenal.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
$ apt-cache search openal
libopenal0a - OpenAL is a portable library for 3D spatialized audio
$ sudo apt-get install libopenal0a

You may receive other errors if you do not have a full Python installation.  Try to get a full Python installation with your package manager.