Installing a tarball will get you the most up-to-date stable version of digiKam. But it can happen that you run into all kinds of problems related to compiling.

So, if your distribution is running behind a lot, you can install a tarball.

Before installing a tarball, it is better to prevent conflicts to uninstall the digiKam package provided by your distribution.

First you have to download digiKam from :

- This repository for stable releases.

- For older releases deprecated and not maintained look here.

Second you need to install all digiKam dependencies.

Extract the tarball via tar -xvJf filename.xz, enter the extracted directory and then you need to issue a set of commands. You need to specify an installation prefix. This will be the base path of the installation. To determine the correct installation path, use `kf5-config --prefix` and provide it as a parameter for cmake, as shown in the example commands below:


bootstrap.linux
cd build
make
su
make install


Notes:

- A bootstrap script is also available to configure for OSX through Macports.
- A bootstrap script is also available to configure for Windows through MXE (cross compiling with MinGW). Forget a native compilation using Microsoft Visual C++. It's a waste of time as this compiler is a big weird puzzle...