How to install Pencil sketching tool on Ubuntu 12.04

Today I was working on an interface concept for an old web application I’ve develped few years ago. On my notebook I had an old version of Pencil Sketching tool so I’ve decided to install on my Desktop the latest version of Pencil… but the way I had to do it it’s not so fast as you can mind.

When I went on the Pencil Web site, I’ve noticed that there were a lot of package available and I thought that my Ubuntu architecture is 64bit, so let’s download the amd64… but nothing to do… the installer told me that my architecture is not compliant.

No worry, I’ve tried to download the 32bit version and after trying to install it with dpkg command and, after few seconds (no more than one minute), it told me that “the sub process was interrupted by the signal (Pipe broken)”…

“Great!” Was my only word! :-)

I’ve tried to extract the package into a temporary directory and taking a look to the directory contents. After I’ve discvover the pencil binary file I’ve tried to execute it from shell and it told me that xulrunner 1.9.2 is missing! “Oh damn!!!”

Because I got what I want, I’ve downloaded the evoluspencil_2.0.2-1_i386.deb from http://code.google.com/p/evoluspencil/downloads/list and I’ve done other tests.

First of all I’ve installed xulrunner from the mozilla servers using the following commands (thanks to tip I found on askubunt by izx):

FFVER=`grep -Po  "\d{2}\.\d+" /usr/lib/firefox/platform.ini`
ARCH=`uname -p`
XURL=https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/releases/$FFVER/runtimes/xulrunner-$FFVER.en-US.linux-$ARCH.tar.bz2
cd /opt
sudo sh -c "wget -O- $XURL | tar -xj"
sudo ln -s /opt/xulrunner/xulrunner /usr/bin/xulrunner
sudo ln -s /opt/xulrunner/xpcshell /usr/bin/xpcshell

Then I’ve tried to execute again the pencil binary file and It told me that some things were missed. Well, the package contains the directory usr/share/pencil, I’ve copied it into the /usr/share/pencil/ directory of my Ubuntu and tried againg.

It works fine!