Daniel Nouri's Blog

Apparently, SuperCollider is no longer available in the official package repositories for recent versions of Debian and Ubuntu, despite the official SuperCollider download page pointing us there. The lack of a Debian package is quite annoying; besides it can easily bugger a rookie's SuperCollider experience on these systems.

So this is the Debian package that I've built using the infrastructure (namely the debian/ directory) that's already in the source distribution:

Download SuperCollider 3.2 deb package for Debian and Ubuntu

Download the .deb package and run sudo dpkg -i supercollider3.deb to install it! If you have a graphical Debian package installer like the GDebi Package installer, you can use that.

I applied two small patches:

• The first allows the Emacs Lisp contained in the distribution to be compiled on my system, with Emacs 23.
• The second deals with an issue with class library paths.

I use Emacs for pretty much everything, that's why the Emacs mode for SC works pretty well for me (although it can be quirky at times...). If you're unfamiliar with Emacs, I suggest you use the fabulous and super easy sced plugin for gedit. The steps for installing sced are a bit cumbersome, but it's totally worth it. Maybe I should try and make a Debian package of sced next.

Update: Ha! A minute after I publish this, I find out that the nice guy behind sced (sorry, I still can't figure out how to write non-ASCII characters here ;-), quite recently released SuperCollider packages for Ubuntu Hardy (which I suppose work for Debian just as well). And his packages look much better than mine. Oh well! :-)

Update: Another update. Our friend behind gedit released a Debian package for gedit. And he's written a short tutorial on how to get started. Go and read it!