Even though an Arduino IDE can be easily installed on Ubuntu-like Linux system using the simple apt install arduino command, the version you will can get this way will be quite old – without the latest features and complicity in getting help on the Internet.
In this note i will show the recommended way of how to install the latest version of the Arduino IDE on Ubuntu, though these commands should work for the other Linux systems as well.
Cool Tip: Add “Arduino Pro Micro” board to the Arduino IDE! Read more →
Install Arduino IDE on Ubuntu Linux
Download a tarball with the latest version of the Arduino IDE from the official web-site:
$ wget https://downloads.arduino.cc/arduino-1.8.16-linux64.tar.xz
Unpack the tarball, move it to the /opt/ folder and execute an installation script:
$ tar -xvf arduino-1.8.16-linux64.tar.xz $ sudo mv arduino-1.8.16 /opt/ $ cd /opt/arduino-1.8.16/ $ ./install.sh
This script adds a desktop shortcut, menu item and file associations for Arduino IDE.
After running the installation script without sudo, you may see the message as follows:
ln: failed to create symbolic link ‘/usr/local/bin/arduino’: Permission denied
Adding symlink failed. Hope that’s OK. If not then rerun as root with sudo.
done!
To create the symbolic link to the Arduino IDE binary, execute:
$ sudo ln -s /opt/arduino-1.8.16/arduino /usr/local/bin/arduino
To avoid the “Error touching serial port. Exception type – Permission denied.” error while trying to upload code to an Arduino microcontroller using the Arduino IDE, you may have to add the current user to the dialout group:
$ sudo usermod -a -G dialout $(whoami)
This gives the current user read and write access to the Arduino device:
$ ls -l /dev/ttyACM* crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 166, 0 Oct 7 18:21 /dev/ttyACM0
Logout and login again to make the group change effective.