Hello all,
I’m a Blender user as a hobby, and my daily activities revolve around the development of software that manages the distribution of software in Ubuntu Linux. In particular, I work in the development team responsible for the new snap format and the platform around it, which is in fact a multi-Linux-distribution effort.
So, last week I decided to merge the two ideas and package Blender as a snap, so that the all the latest releases may be installed on an Ubuntu Linux machine or any other Linuxes that have the snapd platform available.
To try that out, just type this command in a terminal:
snap install blender --classic
The --classic here means “classic confinement”, which implies blender will have full access into the host system as usual.
The command above will install the latest stable release (2.78c, at the time of writing), with the binaries built by the Blender Foundation.
The following additional channels are also available right now:
- stable - The current 2.78 stable release.
- candidate - The test builds for the upcoming 2.79 release.
- beta - The latest builds for the upcoming 2.79 release.
- edge - The experimental and somewhat unstable builds for the medium term Blender 2.8 release.
To install from edge and have a look at the progress on 2.8, for example, just append a flag such as –edge at the end of the above command:
snap install blender --classic --edge
The installed Blender will be updated automatically from the selected channel (using deltas for bandwidth saving), and can easily be reverted into the previously installed revision when desired by typing snap revert.
Run snap info blender to see all versions currently available. For example, as of this moment:
$ snap info blender
name: blender
summary: Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite.
publisher:
description: |[indent] Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the
entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation,
rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game
creation.
Blender is a public project, made by hundreds of people from around the
world; by studios and individual artists, professionals and hobbyists,
scientists, students, VFX experts, animators, game artists, modders, and
the list goes on.
commands: - blender
- blender.player
- blender.softwaregl
channels: stable: 2.78c (5) 119MB classic
candidate: 2.79-testbuild2 (3) 132MB classic
beta: 2.78-e982ebd6d4f (8) 148MB classic
edge: 2.80-9a5d06cdd54 (7) 148MB classic
[/indent]
Anyway, hope you enjoy, and please let me know if you have any questions or issues.