While working on a stackoverflow answer about Sikuli today, I noted that installing Sikuli on Ubuntu 12.04 isn't a one-step process - there are a few dependencies that need manual intervention before you even install it.

Here's the rundown of the steps that worked for me to get a simple Sikuli script working:

1. Install the Oracle JRE

I used version 1.7.0_51:

$ java -version
java version "1.7.0_51"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_51-b13)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.51-b03, mixed mode)

Make sure java is in your PATH, or else the Sikuli IDE will have issues.

2. Install OpenCV 2.4.0

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gijzelaar/opencv2.4
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get libcv-dev

Alternatively, you can probably achieve the same by building/installing OpenCV 2.4.0 from source. I went the package route, though.

3. Install Tesseract 3

sudo apt-get install libtesseract3

4. Download and launch sikuli-setup.jar

As recommended in the Sikuli install guide, I saved the installer to ~/SikuliX and ran it there as well.

mkdir ~/SikuliX
cd ~/SikuliX && java -jar sikuli-setup.jar

From there, I selected the "Pack 1" option in the GUI and let setup proceed normally.

5. Launch the Sikuli IDE, create a Sikuli script, and run it.

To launch the IDE, I'm using the command:

~/SikuliX/runIDE

If the IDE dies without an error after you try running your script with the Run button in the GUI, running your .sikuli project on the command line may help uncover what's going wrong.

To do so, you can use the "runIDE -r" option; you'll hopefully get much more info about the error.

For example, running the project "foo.sikuli" on the command line is as simple as:

~/SikuliX/runIDE -r foo.sikuli