How to Install Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 18.04 | 16.04

This brief tutorial shows students and new users how to install Arduino IDE on Ubuntu 18.04 | 16.04.

Arduino is a popular, open-source physical computing platform used to develop stand-alone interactive objects that interact and controls small electronic boards using sensors.

If you’re a developer who designs and manufactures single-board micro-controllers and looking for a platform to build and manage you applications, Arduino IDE should be a great place to start… It is built from the ground up for IDE developers to get stuff done!

Arduino runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, including Ubuntu.

Before you can start programming your micro-controllers, you’re going to need an IDE program, and Arduino (IDE) is a good one!

For more about Arduino, check out its homepage.

When you’re ready to install and use Arduino, follow the steps below:

There are multiple ways to get Arduino installed on Ubuntu. You can use its office DEB packages as well as install it via Ubuntu Snaps.

Option 1: Installing Arduino IDE via DEB Package

Arduino packages are not available via Ubuntu default repositories. If you need to install it, you must download its .DEB package from its download’s page.

It can be installed on both 32-bit or 64-bit version of Ubuntu.

Alternatively, you can use the following wget command to download the Arduino Software (IDE) package directly on the terminal.

At the time of this writing, the current latest version is 1.8.12.

cd /tmp
wget https://downloads.arduino.cc/arduino-1.8.12-linux64.tar.xz

Next, extract the downloaded archive file using the tar command as shown below.

tar -xvf arduino-1.8.12-linux64.tar.xz

Now move into the extracted arduino-1.8.12 directory and run the installation script as root.

cd arduino-1.8.12/
sudo ./install.sh

Once the installation is done, a desktop icon will be created on your desktop. The first time you launch it, it will prompt you to trust it with a message as shown below:

Arduino Ubuntu install

Click the Trust and Launch button to open the app.

Arduino Ubuntu Setup

That’s how to install Arduino on Ubuntu via its .DEB package.

Option 2: Install Arduino IDE via Snap

If you rather install Arduino IDE via Snap, then use the commands below.

Snaps are containerized software packages that are simple to create and install… It’s a new way to manage packages on Linux systems and is supported by the top Linux distributions…

It’s probably the easiest way to install and manage packages on Linux systems, including Ubuntu…

Run the commands below to install Snap packages and install Arduino IDE.

sudo apt install snapd
sudo snap install arduino

In order to upload code an arduino board over USB, you need to add your user to the dailout group and connect the snap to the raw-usb socket.

Open a terminal window, run the following commands an reboot your computer.

sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER
sudo snap connect arduino:raw-usb

Now restart your computer and you’re good to go!

That’s it!

Conclusion:

This post showed you how to install Arduino IDE software on Ubuntu 18.04 | 16.04 systems. If you find any errors above, please use the comment form below to report.

Thanks!

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