Gambas released new 3.19.0 few days ago. Here’s the new features and how to to install guide for Ubuntu users!

Gambas is a full-featured object-oriented language and development environment built on a BASIC interpreter. It’s made up of a compiler, interpreter, archiver, scripter, development environment, and many extension components, for easily developing command-line, GTK2/GTK3, Qt, Database, Web, SDL applications.

The latest version so far is Gambas 3.19.0 that includes many exciting new features. First, as you see above, it has a new app icon that’s called gambas-thin. Though, I personally prefer the old one a bit more.

old gambas3 icon

The new release brings huge improvements to interpreter, to make it faster than Python, Perl and Java interpreters in all benchmarks!

For Linux, the IDE can now generate AppImage package, which is an universal Linux package format (run in sandbox) to launch software application without installation. And, Wayland, the default session in recent GNOME Desktop (default in Ubuntu and Fedora), now has the gb.media and gb.media.form components, and better GUI components support.

Other new features in Gambas 3.19.0 include:

• Support for the russian e2k architecture.
• Many enhancements to the IDE image editor.
• Faster tree filter in IDE.
• Global shortcut to open LinkedIn
• Support for computed GOTO and GOSUB.
• New Dec and Base$ functions for converting integers in any base.
• The database component now can retrieve the contents of a newly inserted record.
• The gb.desktop component now uses the freedesktop portal by default if present.
• New syntax highlighter component based on definition files: gb.highlight.
• Support for the dict:// protocol in the gb.net.curl component.
• See release note for more details.

How to Install Gambas 3.19.0 in Ubuntu

Gambas has an official Ubuntu PPA so far supports Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 23.10, and even old Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, 14.04. While, Ubuntu 24.04 has already made the new release packages in system repository.

1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gambas-team/gambas3

Type user password (no visual feedback, just type in mind) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.

2. For Linux Mint and old Ubuntu 16.04 & 14.04, you may need to manually refresh package cache after adding PPA.

sudo apt update

3. Finally, install Gambas, as well as the compiler, runtime interpreter, scripter, IDE, and extension components by running command:

sudo apt install gambas3

After installation, search for and launch gambas from either start menu or Gnome overview depends on your desktop environment.

For how to get started with Gambas, see the official documentation.

Uninstall Gambas

To uninstall, simply open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove gambas3

Also remove the PPA either by running command in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:gambas-team/gambas3

or by removing the source line via Software & Updates tool under Other Software tab.