GIMP won't open any more

My GIMP is not opening any more, after trying to upgrade to 2.7 (I added the PPA to do that).

I got an error when trying to upgrade that said some dependencies couldn't be solved.

So I removed the PPA, removed GIMP altogether, and reinstalled the standard GIMP... installation went ok but now it won't open. How can I troubleshoot it?

Invoking gimp in a Terminal gives:

gimp: error while loading shared libraries: libbabl-0.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Solution 1:

Here we go:

sudo apt-get remove gimp
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get purge gimp libgegl* libbabl* 
sudo apt-get install gimp 

This worked for me.

Source: http://bentwithlove.blogspot.com/2011/05/gimperror-while-loading-shared.html

And if you add the ppa

ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn

you can get the latest 2.7 gimp!

Solution 2:

I had the ppa @Alex mentions installed, but my that gave me the same libbabl-0.0.so.0 problem like you.

If you are satisfied with gimp 2.6, the following worked for me (Ubuntu 12.04):

1) remove the matthaeus123 ppa。 As pointed out by @Eliah Kagan, the safer way to do this is:

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:matthaeus123/mrw-gimp-svn

2) Do something like @Alex said. I did:

sudo apt-get remove gimp
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get purge gimp libgegl* libbabl*
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get install gimp