Now, I've spent some time hopping through the GuitarPro forums, and there is high demand for GP6 on x64 Linux, but it's just not happening. Let's face it, we Linux users make up less than 10% of the total user base in the US. Not a lot of reason to throw money at developing something for an even smaller percentage of people who use that product on Linux.
Wait... We're Linux users... we don't need a proper 64 bit port. WE'LL MAKE IT WORK!
Since version 12.04 LTS, the usual "hack n' bash" method won't work to get this fine piece of software running on the 64 bit version of Ubuntu, but I have stumbled upon a method through long searching of ubuntuforums.com (Great place, check it out!) and Googling what things meant. So here we go!
First, I had to install a few things. Because this is a 32 bit application we need the 32bit libraries so it can run. In a terminal, run
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
There, now we have those pesky libraries.
GuitarPro uses the qt library system to draw it's windows and buttons. We'll need to install a configuration tool to change some qt settings as to avoid an incompatibility error with the 64bit version of qt.
sudo apt-get install qtconfig-qt4
Now just run qtconfig from the dashboard or menu, or gnome-do, or whatever you use and set the theme to anything but the default. I chose clearlooks.
Now, I'm hoping you've already downloaded the GuitarPro Package from their website, if not, you should do that now and then direct your terminal to the directory that package is and then run
sudo dpkg --force-depends -i gp6-full-linux-demo-rxxxxxx.deb
(where rxxxxxx is the release number)
This will install GuitarPro! Yay! It's installed!
If you try to run guitar pro it won't start. This is because it's missing a dependency. Go back to your terminal and run
sudo apt-get install -f
Now you have the libaudio library that GuitarPro needed, but now Aptitude is getting an attitude and removed GuitarPro.
Go back to your terminal and once again run
sudo dpkg --force-depends -i gp6-full-linux-demo-rxxxxxx.deb
Now run GuitarPro and activate it and update it. The update process is buggy, so you have to be a bit patient. By the time you've got it activated you've probably noticed the giant warning message in your system tray about broken packages and what-not. Don't take any action yet, it wants to kill GuitarPro again, because it thinks GuitarPro is breaking dependencies.
Open up that terminal again and let's backup GuitarPro!
sudo cp -r /opt/GuitarPro6 /home/user/GuitarPro6
sudo apt-get install -f
sudo rm -rf /opt/GuitarPro6
sudo cp -r /home/user/GuitarPro6 /opt/GuitarPro6
(where user is your user name)
Now, you have GuitarPro and fixed packages, but you have no dashboard icon for GuitarPro, or even a menu shortcut (for those of you on non-Unity DE's). There's a fix for that!
You can create a dashboard/menu icon manually using alacarte (Tutorial to come later) or you make one manually (my preferred method). You can also create a dashboard icon for just you, or for everyone.
For just you, you'll need to create a file called gp6.desktop in /home/user/.local/share/applications/
For everyone, you'll need to create the file in
/usr/share/applications/
Your .desktop file can be created in any text editor and should look like this
#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=GuitarPro6
Comment=Best Guitar Tabulature Software Evrar!
Exec=/opt/GuitarPro6/GuitarPro
Path=/opt/GuitarPro6/
Icon=/opt/GuitarPro6/GP6.png
Terminal=false
Categories=Audio;
StartupNotify=false
I had to download my own icon and place it in the directory, so your icon may not show up right away.
After that, you're done! It works!
I'll try to get some screenshots up for this, and until then, please let me know if you try this and run into any errors, or things that don't work. I'll be trying this on an AMD powered system very shortly, but until then, later!
