Installing the Arduino IDE on Linux

1. Overview

The Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is an open-source and user-friendly application and toolkit that enables us to program microcontroller boards compatible with Arduino. It consists of an attractive user interface and supports multiple programming languages. Further, the platform is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at some methods that we can use to install the Arduino IDE on Linux.

Notably, we’ll perform these operations on Ubuntu. However, the same process applies to some other distributions as well.

2. Using apt

Before starting to explore, we ensure that the packages on the system are up-to-date. To do this, we use the apt command, which is the main package manager for Debian-based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu.

Firstly, let’s use the apt update command to update the package list on the system:

$ sudo apt update

In case of any available upgrades, let’s utilize the upgrade subcommand to perform the necessary steps. This way, we ensure the environment is up-to-date.

Finally, we can use the apt command to install the Arduino IDE on the system:

$ sudo apt install arduino
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  arduino-builder arduino-core-avr arduino-ctags avr-libc avrdude binutils
  binutils-avr binutils-common binutils-x86-64-Linux-gnu build-essential
  ca-certificates-java default-jre default-jre-headless dpkg-dev
  extra-xdg-menus fakeroot fonts-dejavu-extra g++ g++-11 gcc gcc-11 gcc-avr
...

Once the process is finished, we should have the Arduino IDE installed on our device.

3. Using snap

The snap utility is a command-line tool that we can use for installing and managing snaps on our system. Snaps are a type of software package that can often be created and installed easily and more universally on Linux devices.

In this section, we use the snap command to download the snap for the Arduino IDE application and install the toolkit using that.

However, before we step into the installation part, let’s verify that snap is installed on our device. To do that, we can use the snap –version command, which lists the currently installed snap version on the system:

$ snap --version
snap    2.44.1
snapd   2.44.1
series  16
ubuntu  22.04
kernel  5.3.0-40-generic

Evidently, the version that we’re currently using is 2.44.1.

If the command doesn’t provide an output like the above, it may indicate that snap isn’t in the system $PATH or isn’t installed on our system. In this case, we’ll install it using apt:

$ sudo apt install snapd

Next, let’s use the snap command to install the Arduino IDE on the device:

$ sudo snap install arduino
Download snap "arduino" (85) from channel "stable"

After the installation is complete, we see a notification about it in the terminal:

arduino 1.8.19 from Snapcrafters installed

Thus, we get the Arduino IDE package via snap.

4. Using flatpak

We can also use the flatpak command to install the Arduino IDE on the system. It’s another utility that enables us to install and manage software packages on Linux.

Before proceeding, we install flatpak on the device as it’s not a built-in tool on Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt install flatpak

Then, we use the flatpak command to add the Flathub repository to the system, which includes a variety of applications, including the Arduino IDE:

$ sudo flatpak remote-add flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Finally, we employ flatpak to install the Arduino IDE on the system:

$ flatpak install flathub cc.arduino.arduinoide
Looking for matches...
Required runtime for cc.arduino.arduinoide/x86_64/stable
(runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/22.08) found in remote flathub
...

Upon completion, we should have the Arduino IDE as an installed application on the system.

5. Manual Installation

There’s also a manual way of downloading and installing the Arduino IDE on a device. Let’s go through the process step-by-step.

First, we go to the official downloads page for the Arduino IDE and download the latest .tar archive from there.

After downloading, we navigate to the directory where the downloaded .tar file is stored:

$ cd Downloads

Then, we use the tar command to extract the contents of the .tar file to the current directory:

$ tar -xf arduino-1.8.19-linux64.tar.xz

Here, we employ the -f option to specify the archive name and the -x option to extract the contents of the archive to the working directory.

Next, we navigate to the newly extracted directory and execute the install.sh script located inside it to install the Arduino IDE on the system:

$ cd arduino-1.8.19
$ sudo sh install.sh

Once the operation is complete, we should have a working installation of Arduino IDE.

6. Conclusion

In this article, we went through some methods that can help us install the Arduino IDE application on Linux.

No matter which method we go for, we’ll be able to install this utility on the system with ease.