Koala, a good tool for developers

Koala Screenshot

Really in Ubuntu and in Gnu / Linux there are few tools for developers, but the few that exist are overwhelmingly good. We have the case of Netbeans, Sublime Text, brackets, Eclipse and many others, however so far the use of preprocessors it was quite limited. While it is true that we have many editors that can create files for preprocessors, there are not many tools that allow us to see the modifications in real time, that is, to be able to precompile those files to later dump it into the css file. Koala it is one of those few tools that allow us to use preprocessors and see what we create in real time.

What tools are there for preprocessing?

If you know how to use preprocessors, you will already know some very useful tools for working with preprocessors. The best of all is codekit, the pity is that it only works for Mac OS. Codekit is not only the best but it is also the paradigm of the rest of the tools. Currently, a tool has been released for Windows capable of overshadowing codekit, is named Sorry, but this tool only stands out because it goes where it does not go codekit. As for the Gnu / Linux and Ubuntu world, the most similar tool to these is Koala, a fairly powerful program that resembles Codekit and Prepros, in terms of interface.

What does Koala offer?

Koala offers us the possibility of using the preprocessors, less, Sass, CofeeScript and Compass Framework. Koala is found in several languages, including Spanish, and it allows us to minify our code, both css and javascript. The project of Koala is in Github, where in addition to finding the installation files, we find a great guide to be able to install Koala, fix existing problems and configure our projects. The project of Koala is Open Source, so we do not need to pay any license, although it is good to make a donation, since the project is being carried out selflessly but the web, the time or the testing they are not usually free.

Koala Installation

To be able to install Koala and that it works in our Ubuntu, we first need to open the terminal and write the following:

sudo apt-get install ruby

This will install Ruby on our computer, it is not essential for Koala to work but for Sass to work, so it is advisable to install it first. Once it is installed we will the official website and we download the package corresponding to our version of Ubuntu (32 bits or 64 bits). Once we have installed it, we open it and it may happen that it does not open; seems to be that there are problems with some Gnu / Linux systems, in my case, for example, I have Ubuntu Gnome 13.10 and I could not open it the first time, to solve it, we open the terminal and go to

cd / lib / i386-linux-gnu if you have 32 bits

cd / lib / x86_64-linux-gnu if you have 64 bits

Once there we wrote

sudo ln -s libudev.so.1 libudev.so.0

It may not tell us that the file does not exist so then we install the file libudev0 and then we repeat the last action. After this we will have Koala working perfectly and ready to use the preprocessors. Does anyone offer any other?


6 comments, leave yours

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  1.   Marlon said

    Thanks friend, the error was very helpful.

  2.   Oscar said

    I have 4 hours trying to install Koala through the instructions of the official site and although it showed me in the menu of my ubuntu, it could not execute properly, it did not open the Koala interface, with these MINIMUM and SIMPLE steps I can already run Koala as it should. Thanks !

  3.   Fabian said

    I'm going to download it and try, it sounds like a very good application

  4.   Work said

    This post has been a long time ago and we are already on 18.4 Lts, for Koala to open (because it continues with the same failure, it does not open) you have to install:

    $ sudo apt -y install libgconf2-4

    As explained by Dusha Kucher in a post about this error. I installed it and it worked.

  5.   Jorge Sierra said

    I don't want to run the program on debian 10, I run sudo ln -s libudev.so.1 libudev.so.0 and I get that it failed to create symbolic link 'libudev.so.0' the file already exists.

  6.   Sergio said

    Hello friends, I had the same problem, I installed Koala by downloading it from the official website (the 64-bit deb) and it did not open the program, I installed from the package manager or Synaptic (since in the terminal it told me that the package did not exist) libgconf2-4 and voila, now if Koala works on Ubuntu 20.04 bits.