To get the Linux edition of Praat, you either do sudo apt-get install praat, or you get it from Debian, or you compile it yourself from the source code, or you download the binary executable on this page. This binary will only work on Intel and compatible computers.

The binary has been statically linked with Open Motif 2.3 (Xm), and requires the Xp, Xft, png, Xt, X11, m, pthread, and asound libraries on your computer.

To download the latest version, click on the compressed archive:

praat5125_linux_motif.tar.gz (20 January 2010; 3.0 MB)

Unpack with gunzip and tar xvf. This will create the executable file praat. You can remove the tar file.

Running Praat

Praat will work fine wherever it is on your disk; just type praat or click the icon.

If Praat's graphical interface appears poorly, try starting Praat with praat -motif.

Known possible problems, and their solution

On Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mandriva, it has been reported that you sometimes cannot type any letters into Praat: when Praat is started from the command line, there will be a long error message starting with something like "Unknown keysym name: osfActivate".

The cause of the problem is that Motif expects that the file XKeysymDB is located in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/, but on these distributions XKeysymDB is actually located in /usr/share/X11/.

If you can become root, you could type XKEYSYMDB=/usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB into the file /etc/environment. Or you could simply copy or link XKeysymDB to the expected location with

   cp /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/

or

   ln -s /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/

If you do any of these tricks, it will work for all users on your computer. If you cannot become root, you could include

   export XKEYSYMDB=/usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB

in your .profile, .login or .cshrc file.