darktable is an amazing software to deal with raw files taken from various camera.

Here is the description I get from README.md file inside the source directory:

darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

Certainly there is a simple way to install darktable that is by using apt-get once you added the PPA. More information about that can be read from here.

Currently the PPA will give you darktable 1.4.2 which I found to be OK but I simply need to test the latest, hoping for some fixes or UI changes and new feature. The version 1.4.2 was working fine with some hiccups here and there. The latest one seems faster with no hiccups, couldn’t notice any UI changes though. At the moment, compiling from source get me darktable 1.5.1+68~ge99de72.

Lets do it, you might want to install git first if you haven’t done it.

Get the source codes from Github:

git clone git://github.com/darktable-org/darktable.git
cd darktable

Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install cmake intltool xsltproc fop libgtk2.0-dev libsqlite3-dev libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libcairo2-dev liblcms2-dev libexiv2-dev libtiff-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libgphoto2-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libopenexr-dev libsoup2.4 libwebp-dev librsvg2-dev

Compile source code, my plan is to install it in /opt/darktable:

./build.sh --prefix /opt/darktable --buildtype Release

Install:

cd build/
sudo make install
sudo ln -s /opt/darktable/bin/darktable /usr/local/bin/

Run darktable from Linux console:

darktable

Enjoy.