A 30-Year-Old GIMP Build Used to Create Tux Is Now a Linux Flatpak

Open-source developers never cease to surprise us. Who would have thought a nearly 30-year-old version of GIMP would be brought back to life as a Flatpak, giving modern Linux users a rare chance to run one of the most historically important builds of the image editor?

The package revives GIMP 0.54.1, a 1996 release from before the project switched to GTK. It was created by GNOME developer balooii as a small retro packaging effort, allowing the ancient Motif-based version of GIMP to run on current 64-bit Linux systems.

That alone makes it an interesting software archaeology project, but there is much more to this particular version than meets the eye. GIMP 0.54 was also the version Larry Ewing used to create the original Tux penguin mascot, one of the operating system’s most recognizable symbols.

“I used nothing but a mouse and a lot of patience. I started by drawing a rough outline of the penguin, and carefully closed all the holes in the shape.”

Ewing’s archived notes on the famous Linux penguin state that the images were created entirely in GIMP 0.54. Most of the work was done on a 486 DX2/50 running Linux, using only a mouse, with final smoothing later performed on an SGI Crimson, also using GIMP.

GIMP 0.54.1 also marks an important point in the project’s development. It was the last GIMP version based on Motif, the commercial Unix widget toolkit used before GTK. At the time, that dependency made GIMP difficult to distribute freely on Linux and limited participation from developers without access to Motif.

That problem pushed GIMP’s developers to write their own toolkit. The result was GTK, originally the GIMP Toolkit, which later became a core technology behind GNOME and many Linux desktop applications.

Of course, nobody should expect GIMP 0.54.1 to be useful as a modern image editor. This is an ancient build from a different Linux desktop era, when GIMP was a slightly odd, multi-window application, long before today’s GIMP features, interface, plug-ins, color management, and file format support.

Its value is purely historical with zero practical use. But even so, it shows what GIMP looked like before GTK existed, before GNOME became a popular desktop environment, and before Tux became the recognized face of Linux.

But perhaps the real value of projects like this is that they let us revisit long-forgotten pieces of computing history, with a touch of nostalgia and plenty of smiles, while giving younger users a chance to experience something they would otherwise know only from screenshots of a bygone era.

For those ready to take a walk down memory lane, download the ready-made gimp-0.54.1-8.flatpak package from the project’s GitLab page, then open a terminal in the download directory and run flatpak install --user gimp-0.54.1-8.flatpak. Once installed, GIMP 0.54.1 should appear in the application menu like any other Flatpak app.