Running PTGui on Linux

PTGui is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The PTGui license is platform independent, so a single license allows you to use PTGui on all major desktop platforms.

For technical and licensing reasons, PTGui for Linux is distributed as a dynamically linked binary and requires a compatible Linux environment. PTGui 13 is built against glibc 2.28, which is found in Debian 10. There are many Linux distributions and we can't guarantee compatibility with every one, but it should generally run in all current glibc-based linux environments. Some common libraries such as gtk3 and zlib are needed but these come preinstalled with most graphical Linux desktop environments. One particular requirement is the OpenCL ICD library, this is needed for OpenCL GPU acceleration. If your system supports OpenCL, it will already be installed with the GPU driver. But OpenCL ICD should be installed even if OpenCL is not actually used or supported. The PTGui Viewer requires OpenGL 3.2 which may require vendor provided GPU drivers.

Installation

Download the PTGui application from this website. You will get a .tar.gz archive. To install, do this:
cd /tmp && tar xvfz PTGui_X.XX.tar.gz
/tmp/ptgui_X.XX/install.sh
# or prefix with 'sudo' if you wish to install for all users.
Replace X.XX with the actual name of the downloaded file. This copies the necessary files to $HOME/.local/share/ptgui or /opt/ptgui and adds PTGui and PTGui Viewer to the desktop environment.

Alternatively, just extract the .tar.gz file somewhere and run PTGui from the extracted archive. No installation is needed.

Prerequisites

The following packages must be installed:

Debian 10 and later:
sudo apt install libgtk-3-0
# Your GPU vendor's driver may already provide libOpenCL.so
# On systems not supporting OpenCL, the OpenCL ICD stub must be installed:
sudo apt install ocl-icd-libopencl1

Fedora 31:
sudo dnf install libglvnd-opengl
# Your GPU vendor's driver may already provide libOpenCL.so
# On systems not supporting OpenCL, the OpenCL ICD stub must be installed:
sudo dnf install ocl-icd

NixOS:
A nix derivation is included with the PTGui download. See ptgui.nix for more information.

Notes

Beware of Linux' Out-Of-Memory killer. If the system runs out of ram, Linux may silently kill processes using much memory (such as PTGui). This will result in PTGui silently quitting, printing only 'Killed' to the standard output. Running dmesg will provide more information. To prevent this from happening, reduce the amount of RAM used by PTGui in Options - Advanced. Also it's advisable to add some swap to Linux to prevent this from happening.

Support and feedback

If you need more help, please post to the PTGui Support Forum. If you have tried running PTGui in other Linux distributions please let us know your experiences so we can keep this page updated.
PTGui and PTGui Pro are products of New House Internet Services B.V., Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The PTGui and PTGui Pro software, related documentation and all contents on this site are © Copyright 2000-2025 New House Internet Services B.V., Rotterdam, The Netherlands. All rights reserved.