Installing Julia Studio on Ubuntu 13.10

I’ve been a user of Julia for a while now and it has developed greatly over the past year. I did however take a break from using due to a lot of trouble installing Julia Studio on my Ubuntu 13.10. I’m not blaming anyone for this unsuccessful endeavor, I’m just saying I didn’t have the tech savvy or the time to tinker with my Ubuntu.

Nonetheless, I have now successfully got it up and running and I am enjoying every minute of it.  Therefore, I wanted to give all of you other guys, who, like me, are not that tech savvy yet, a quick guide to successfully install Julia Studio on your machine.

The quickest way would be to compile Julia Studio from source, but since that takes a lot of time, I figured a quicker way is the following:

1. Install Julia Programming Language – most recent stable release (0.2.1)

You can easily do this by adding the following ppa:

ppa:staticfloat/juliareleases

You can do this simply by copying the following in your Terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:staticfloat/juliareleases

Now you need to tell your system to update the information content from your new repository

sudo apt-get update

And now you can install the latest stable release of Julia

sudo apt-get install julia

This should take care of all dependencies, so whatever your system, you should have a clean install experience. And there you go! Julia is now installed on your system.

2. Download and Install Julia Studio

You need to get the latest download of Julia Studio. Mind you, there is only a 64bit Ubuntu version available.

Once you have downloaded it, you just need to extract the archive in a folder of your choice. I installed it in /opt , but that is a matter of personal choice.

If you decide to follow my example, a simple way to do this is just by going to your Downloads folder

cd ~/Downloads

And using

sudo tar xzf julia-studio-linux-64-0.4.4.tar.gz -C /opt

Note that I did this as root user, since I can’t write in my /opt folder in Ubuntu otherwise. In the above, you can just change /opt to your preferred installation folder. Now you only need to navigate to said installation folder

cd /opt/Julia_Studio/bin

And you can run your program with

cd /opt/Julia_Studio/bin

./JuliaStudio

If you want to just run it from your terminal you have two options.

a) You can create a symbolic link to your Julia Studio executable (located in /opt/Julia_Studio/bin if you followed the above step) in /usr/bin by doing

sudo ln -s /opt/Julia_Studio/bin/JuliaStudio /usr/bin/JuliaStudio

this should let you start your JuliaStudio from the terminal by just typing

JuliaStudio

without needing to go to  /opt/Julia_Studio/bin/


b) You can create an alias for the programlocally. To do that, open .bashrc file, which is in your home directory:

sudo nano ~/.bashrc


And add the following line to the end of the file:

alias JuliaStudio=”/opt/Julia_Studio/bin/JuliaStudio”


Finally, restart the Terminal, and you should now be able to start JuliaStudio from anywhere.

3. Troubleshooting

1. If you managed to extract Julia Studio, but once you start it up, it says it can’t find julia-basic, expected path /usr/bin/julia-basic

You probably have version 0.1.2 of Julia installed, and the executable installed is called julia-release-basic. You can either go back to /opt/Julia_Studio/bin and change the symlink (not recommended – personal experience) or you can go back to step 1 and just install the 0.2.1 release of Julia.

2. Qtcreator or Qt driver error in console after start-up.

Julia Studio 0.4.4 uses Qt5, so you might need to upgrade (my Ubuntu had Qt4 installed). You can do this by

sudo apt-get install qt5-default

If this doesn’t work, you can always go ahead and install the full QtCreator (latest version is 5.2 I believe) and be sure you have taken care of it, since this installs Qt5 as dependencies anyway.

sudo apt-get install qtcreator

Thank you for reading, and I hope you managed to install Julia Studio on your Ubuntu system. This should work on other version of Ubuntu too, although I haven’t tried it yet.

As usual, feel free to correct me or add to this information.