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I downloaded a program called Piskel and I can't figure out how to activate it.

I am trying to make a game on Linux Ubuntu and struggling immensely. I needed sprites for the game and they would help me visualize what was happening while testing and such. I looked around online and found a pixel art program called Pixel...

I had seen the program before but didn't think anything of it. When I decided to test it out, and watch a few online videos on how it worked, I fell in love. Unfortunately, I won't always have access to the online version. I sought a downloadable version and discovered they had one for Linux computers!

I clicked download, downloaded it as a ".zip" file, extracted the files and now I don't know what to do.

For the record, yes. I did try to download the Windows version and use Wine but it kept getting an error.

How do I run it and is there a step I'm missing? If so, what is it?

Mauricio Gracia Gutierrez
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J. Sabere
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4 Answers4

8

Running it is straightforward.

  1. Double click the downloaded zip file and unzip the package to your home directory. This will create a directory Piskel-0.11.0-64bits.
  2. Open a terminal (CTRL + ALT + T).
  3. Entercd Piskel-0.11.0-64bits.
  4. Enter ./piskel.

The Piskel window appears. Unfortunately, this program does not follow application standards so there is no easy way to add this to your launcher.

You need to tell the operating system where to look for the piskel command. In this case, that is the current directory, indicated by .. So the command ./piskel means "look in the current directory and execute the program piskel located there".

Jos
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To just run Piskel @Jos solution works, but I found this annoying so I set it as an alias:

  1. if not present create "bash_aliases" file in the home ("~") directory

  2. add the alias, e.g.:

     alias piskel='pathtofolder/piskel'

  3. open any terminal and type "piskel" and it should open.

  4. To make it work in currently open terminals, type:

     source .bashrc

I still ran into the problem @Jos mentioned about adding it to the launcher, and when I pass it a .piskel file I get a error, but I hope this helps!

Sources: How can I create an alias so that when I enter "kt" it executes "killall gnome-terminal"?

lokonu
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In the summer of 2020, three years after the question above was posted, the previous answers stopped working for many people, although they will set you on the right track.

Before attempting to launch Piskel using the terminal or a double-click of the executable file in a graphical file manager, ensure you've installed libgconf-2-4 correctly, because it is no longer distributed along with Piskel by default. (See this GitHub issue.) Otherwise, you will get the following message when trying to run Piskel: ./piskel: error while loading shared libraries: libgconf-2.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

To install the prerequisite on Ubuntu, open a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run sudo apt-get install libgconf-2-4. Enter your superuser password if prompted to do so.

No need to worry about what this library does, but for those who are interested, libgconf-2-4 is a shared library for GConf, a configuration database application which stores application preferences.

After that, it will be possible to launch Piskel the same way Jos instructed.

GPWR
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just create a script .sh on folder of you have decompress Piskel

for example:

/home/myname/myprogs/Piskel.0.1.0/

create your .sh here with this code :

#!/bin/bash
cd ${0%/*}
`./piskel`

now you can move folder, if you change version just copy paste the .sh You can easily create a shortcut now!

Eric Carvalho
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Crypto Logiq
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