The Brick Viewer can be installed on Debian based distribution (Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) from a .deb file. On other distributions it can be installed from source.
First, download the Brick Viewer .deb from here. Right-click on the file and choose "Open with GDebi Package Installer":
Then click "Install Package":
Ready:
In Ubuntu you can also use the Ubuntu Software Center, other Desktop environments have very similar tools that practically work the same way. You can start the Brick Viewer in the application menu under electronic or in a terminal with:
brickv
To install Brick Viewer from the terminal use the following:
wget http://download.tinkerforge.com/tools/brickv/linux/brickv_linux_latest.deb
sudo apt-get install python python-qt4 python-qt4-gl python-opengl python-serial
sudo dpkg -i brickv_linux_latest.deb
To install Brick Viewer from source, download the source from here and install the dependencies:
On Debian based distributions you install them via apt-get. On other distribution you have to search for and install the equivalent packages:
sudo apt-get install python python-qt4 python-qt4-gl python-opengl python-serial pyqt4-dev-tools
First you have to build the Qt .ui files (you'll need pyuic4 for that), change to the folder src/ and run:
python build_all_ui.py
After that you should be able to start brickv from source, change to the folder src/brickv/ and start with:
python main.py