Install the Arduino IDE | Ubuntu

We can download the latest version of the Arduino IDE from the Arduino website (here) as a tarball. A tarball is a type of compressed folder, like a .zip file, commonly used to distrubute software in Linux; its file extension is usually .tar.xz (or .tar.gz, if it uses Z compression. We’ll get to this later).

In order to extract the files we need from the tarball, we can open a terminal, cd to where the downloaded tarball is, then run

tar xvf FILENAME

where FILENAME is the name of the download (typically arduino-(version number)-linux64.tar.xz).

The command can be read as * eXtract from an archive… * Verbosely (meaning it prints the name of every file it finds)… * from a file given by FILENAME.

When the command finishes, run ls again; tar should have created a new folder named arduino-(version number).

cd into the folder; there will be a file named install.sh in the folder. To install the IDE, execute install.sh with

./install.sh

If the script executes correctly and outputs done! at the end of its output, the IDE was installed correctly! Let’s try to launch it in the next step.

Installing via apt
While there is a package for the Arduino IDE on current APT repositories, it has not been updated for a while. As such, while it is still possible to install the IDE by running sudo apt install arduino, it is not recommended to do so, as asking for support when using outdated software is more difficult.