Running PTGui on Linux

Starting with version 12, 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. The PTGui application was built on Ubuntu 16 using gcc 9.3. There are many Linux distributions and we can't guarantee compatibility with every one, but it should generally run in a glibc-based linux environment capable of running gcc 9.3 or later. 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:
mkdir /tmp/ptgui && cd /tmp/ptgui && tar xvfz PTGui_X.XX.tar.gz
sudo /tmp/ptgui/install.sh
Replace X.XX with the actual name of the downloaded file. This copies the necessary files to /opt/ptgui and adds PTGui and PTGui Viewer to the desktop environment.

Prerequisites

The following packages must be installed:

Ubuntu 16 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

Centos 7:
sudo yum install gtk3
# Your GPU vendor's driver may already provide libOpenCL.so
# On systems not supporting OpenCL, the OpenCL ICD stub must be installed:
sudo rpm -ivh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install ocl-icd

Limitations

PTGui currently requires a graphical desktop, it will fail to run if $DISPLAY has not been set. This is the case even when stitching a project from the command line using the '-stitchnogui' flag. If you need to run PTGui 'headless', create a dummy graphical desktop using VNC server and let PTGui use this:
vncserver
# follow instructions, it will ask for a password
export DISPLAY=:1
# now PTGui can be run:
./PTGui
We hope to solve this in a future update.

Also 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.

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 2000-2024 New House Internet Services B.V., Rotterdam, The Netherlands. All rights reserved.