Installing blender 2.69 on ubuntu 12.04

Question

It seems the previous method of using

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:irie/blender
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install blender

No longer works as that contains 2.66. Probably because 2.69 has been officially released. Anyway, I downloaded the tar.bz2 from the official site and extracted it, now I'm trying to figure out how to install it.

I can call it typing

./blender arg1 arg2 ... 

from inside the folder but I want to be able to use it like before where I can just type

blender arg1 arg2 ...

from anywhere into the command line to run it. Does anyone know how?

Answer 1

You have to either add the path where you have downloaded blender to your path environment variable

echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/home/joke/3D/blender/blender-2.69-linux-glibc211-x86_64/' >>~/.profile && . ~/.profile

or create a .desktop file, for example create a file blender_2.69.desktop with:

[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Graphics;3DGraphics;
Comment=3D modeling, animation, rendering and post-production
Exec=/home/joke/3D/blender/blender-2.69-linux-glibc211-x86_64/blender 
#--debug
GenericName=3D modeller
Icon=/home/joke/3D/blender/blender-2.69-linux-glibc211-x86_64/icons/256x256/apps/blender.png
MimeType=application/x-blender;
Name=blender 269\s
Path=
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=true
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-DBUS-ServiceName=
X-DBUS-StartupType=
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
Name[it_IT]=blender 269

obviously replace /home/joke/3D/blender/blender-2.69-linux-glibc211-x86_64/ with the real path