Installing Sikuli Automation Tool on Ubuntu 11.10

Sikuli is a cross-platform automation tool. The software uses computer vision technology to automate UI testing.

In this blog post I describe how to install and setup Sikuli on Ubuntu 11.10 OS.

Download the latest version of Sikuli (http://sikuli.org/download.shtml) and uncompress the zip file. You can also install Sikuli using Ubuntu package manager.

$ sudo apt-get install sikuli-ide

You will need OpenCV 2.1 or later to use Sikuli. If you see the following error, the OpenCV libraries are probably missing on your computer.

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /tmp/tmplib/libVisionProxy.so: libml.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Install OpenCV 2.3 on Ubuntu 11.10

Thanks to Gijs Molenaar we now have OpenCV 2.3 packages for Ubuntu. You can find full installation documentation here.

Open terminal and type the following commands to install OpenCV 2.3 packages. Remember to uninstall older OpenCV versions before you do this.

  $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gijzelaar/cuda
  $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gijzelaar/opencv2.3
  $ sudo apt-get update
  $ sudo apt-get install libcv-dev

Other Required Tools

The Sikuli documentation fails to mention that you need wmctrl package to launch and control GUI applications on Linux.

 $ sudo apt-get install wmctrl 

You are done!

You can now launch Sikuli by typing /usr/bin/sikuli-ide in the terminal program.