The Workbench team have just announced the release of Workbench for Linux, including binary packages and source packages with instructions on how to build. I’m a Gentoo Linux user, so I prefer building from source, and you’ll need to emerge the following packages (and note the USE) requirement as part of the source build process:

# USE="svg" emerge libzip libxml2 libsigc++     libglade libgtksourceviewmm media-libs/glut mysql lua     ossp-uuid libpcre libgnome gtk+ pango cairo

Depending on your config and platform, you may need to bypass some package masking by adding the packages to your /etc/portage/package.keywords file. Then download and install the ctemplate library from google code page. The current Gentoo version is 0.90, and you really should install the 0.91 version. With the required packages and libraries in place, download the Workbench sources and then build:

# cd mysql-workbench-5.1.4alpha# ./autogen.sh# make# make install

That should build and install MySQL Workbench for you. Just to confirm, here’s a screenshot of the built Workbench running on Gentoo Linux and displaying to my Mac OS X-based desktop.