Hey @minuccio -
Meerk40t has a ready-to-run release at their website - let’s give that a try, before building it from source.
First, visit the Meerk40t releases page at:
Scroll down to the Assets section.
Copy the link for MeerK40t-Linux-Ubuntu. You can right-click the link, and click “Copy this link”, and paste into a text editor, to save it for later.
For example, the link I got was
https://github.com/meerk40t/meerk40t/releases/download/0.9.7000/MeerK40t-Linux-Ubuntu-22.04 (this link will change as they make new releases, so always check out the latest releases page)
Let’s download the Meerk40t application from this link, into a folder/directory on your computer.
Where you store downloaded applications is up to your personal preference, but I’ll share what I do…
For example, in my user folder (~), I created a _Tools folder, so I might create something like ~/_Tools/CNC/Meerk40t.
If you would like to create that folder structure, you can run mkdir -p ~/_Tools/CNC/Meerk40t (or whatever folder you prefer) to create the directories.
Let’s change to the Meerk40t directory.
cd ~/_Tools/CNC/Meerk40t (example using the file structure above)
Now, now let’s use wget to download the Meerk40t application into this directory.
# Use wget to download the Meerk40t release URL you saved before
# Example command:
wget https://github.com/meerk40t/meerk40t/releases/download/0.9.7000/MeerK40t-Linux-Ubuntu-22.04
Once the download is finished, you can run ls -lah to verify the file is downloaded.
You may also notice the file permissions look like -rw-r--r--. This means that we can READ (r) the file, but we cannot RUN (x) it yet.
You can use chmod u+x (filename) to make a file executable / run’able.
For this file, we can run:
# Add Execute permissions on this file for the user / owner of this file.
chmod u+x MeerK40t-Linux-Ubuntu-22.04
If you run ls -lah again, you ought to see -rwxr--r--. That x means that the file is executable, and we can run it.
Now that we have the application, and it’s executable, let’s try it out.
# Run Meerk40t from the current directory
./MeerK40t-Linux-Ubuntu-22.04
# Run Meerk40t from other directories, or as a shortcut
/home/(user name)/_Tools/CNC/MeerK40t-Linux-Ubuntu-22.04
My computer’s operating system is Debian “Bookworm” Linux (similar to yours), and after a few moments, the Meerk40t application’s interface opened, ready to go!
See if that works for you - if not, we can figure it out.
Notes on your Python question
I attempted to install using Python - by the way, the command you can try is pip install meerk40t[all] - however, I got blocked when the installer wanted wxpython.
Then I took a step back and thought - wait, do we NEED to install this from source? That’s when I downloaded the release, and it just worked…
If you need to install from source, this is the documentation to follow. Install: Source · meerk40t/meerk40t Wiki · GitHub
I am hoping that the downloadable release works for you. Let us know how it goes, and if you get stuck. We’ll sort it out together, no worries.
Good luck!
// JRO
