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Well Linux doesn't have anything to do with getting effects, cheaper probably, but it's up to the artists and technicians involved. Actually a lot of companies are looking and using Linux at the moment, like Digital Domain (renderin g on Titanic for example), Rhythm and Hues (their work on getting 16 bit Gimp and application porting) and Hammerhead (they even have Linux software to give away). This last SIGGRAPH you copuld here a lot of people from the industry talking about it.

In a break with Slashdot tradition, I admit I was wrong and retract my post.

Also, I pledge that I will hereforth wait no less than twelve (12) hours after smoking crack before posting to Slashdot.

Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

All the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) lacks that Adobe Photo$hop has is robust color management. Plugin anyone?
<O
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XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Actually, you can interchange KDE and GNOME applications if you have both the QT and GTK libraries installed. For example, I can run Dia or Gimp whilst using KDE. Hell, I have run KDE applications using FVWM.

Your comment is a common misconception about the power of the X windows environment. If you want to know why, read this page.

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I checked into VPND somewhat recently to see if it'd be a nice way to link a few LANs which have faily powerful (min 200Mhz) firewalls which could be used to tunnel traffic.

I looked at the source code, as I had to port the program to OpenBSD. My first thought was that the person who wrote the code must've been some ASM programmer who took a 5-hour course in C. The entire body of main is the entire source file. Functional programming? What's that? The code is one big blob function. You can see blocks which are similar and could probably be handled by a separate function, but aren't.

My friend's first comment on waving him over to see the code was, "and you wanted to run that on your server?"

The code looks a lot like procmail's code, and is (IMO) a complete tear down and rewrite. I'm sure a lot can be salvaged from vpnd, but I find it hard to believe that the person who wrote code looking like that also did the strictest possible checking on all input/output code for security problems.

You might want to read the VPN section of the Linux Admin Security Guide for a listing of alternatives.
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Even if it was drawn with GIMP for Eunuchs, they could still claim it was made with WinGIMP because they both write something like "Made with GIMP" in the JPEG/G*F comments.

Even if it was drawn with GIMP for Eunuchs, they could still claim it was made with WinGIMP because they both write something like "Made with GIMP" in the JPEG/G*F comments.

If they need a little coaxing, and don't want to drop Windows, a guy has ported The Gimp to that platform.

GIMP for Win32

I use it and find it to be stable, and at least as rich in features as PSP, if not Photoshop.

Hey Sven, it's better if you include a link to your great FreeType plug-in. :-) Here it is: http://freetype.gimp.org/.

Here are some answers to your suggestions:

• Vector layers. They are no there yet, although this has been discussed several times among the GIMP developers. The current implementation of paths (using the bezier tool) is already using some vectors and the FreeType plug-in can convert text to paths, but this is not exactly what you want. Note that you can apply some basic transformations to the paths (rotation, scaling, shearing), but the support for vectors in the GIMP is still limited. Currently, if you want to work with vectors, it is better to try Gill, the GNOME illustration app. Maybe Gill and GIMP could be merged in the future?
• Non-linear history. This has also been discussed several times, and this will be part of version 2.0. This was even mentioned on a page that the article refers to.
• Line tools. Did you know that you can already draw straight lines, circles, squares and other shapes with the GIMP? To draw a straight line, select any painting tool, click where you want to start your line, then hold shift and click a second time. To draw a circle or a square, use the corresponding selection tools to make a selection, then use Edit->Stroke. The latest development version of the GIMP contains some tips explaining how to do that easily. You can even do some exotic things such as drawing lines with a gradient or with a fading brush.
• Dynamic seletors. Well, I am not sure that I understand what you want. I would be interested in more details...

Many things are already possible with the upcoming version 1.2 of the GIMP. I suggest that you have a look at the tips and on-line help that are distributed with the current version, or that you have a look at some of the recent books, such as Grokking the GIMP or the GIMP handbook by Sven.

Here are some answers to your suggestions:

• Vector layers. They are no there yet, although this has been discussed several times among the GIMP developers. The current implementation of paths (using the bezier tool) is already using some vectors and the FreeType plug-in can convert text to paths, but this is not exactly what you want. Note that you can apply some basic transformations to the paths (rotation, scaling, shearing), but the support for vectors in the GIMP is still limited. Currently, if you want to work with vectors, it is better to try Gill, the GNOME illustration app. Maybe Gill and GIMP could be merged in the future?
• Non-linear history. This has also been discussed several times, and this will be part of version 2.0. This was even mentioned on a page that the article refers to.
• Line tools. Did you know that you can already draw straight lines, circles, squares and other shapes with the GIMP? To draw a straight line, select any painting tool, click where you want to start your line, then hold shift and click a second time. To draw a circle or a square, use the corresponding selection tools to make a selection, then use Edit->Stroke. The latest development version of the GIMP contains some tips explaining how to do that easily. You can even do some exotic things such as drawing lines with a gradient or with a fading brush.
• Dynamic seletors. Well, I am not sure that I understand what you want. I would be interested in more details...

Many things are already possible with the upcoming version 1.2 of the GIMP. I suggest that you have a look at the tips and on-line help that are distributed with the current version, or that you have a look at some of the recent books, such as Grokking the GIMP or the GIMP handbook by Sven.

Created for just such occasions, the Straight Line Tutorial.
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How many people are working on this thing. Is it just the original creator??? Will they have to hire a larger team when they hit the "releasable" 2.0?

The "how many people" question is answered by Sven in the interview, I think. As for the original creator, well, that's an interesting story. And "will they hire a larger team"? Umm, AFAIK, no-one (including distributions and start-ups) has any programmers on payroll for GIMP at this time, so I'm not sure who would be doing the hiring...

Two pages: info and downloads. It's still sketchy on the stability side of things, but if you don't have several hundred dollars to shell out to Adobe, then it's all you've got.

Two pages: info and downloads. It's still sketchy on the stability side of things, but if you don't have several hundred dollars to shell out to Adobe, then it's all you've got.

There is a windows port of GIMP that uses GTK+
located at: http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/

most of it works, except for some random crashes ;-)

Installed it a few days ago, seems to work just fine. Get it here.

Maybe. But maybe you're wrong and the site did ... well, did some kind of "ziviler ungehorsam" - they removed the links, but left the pages somewhere.

Nice trick, because Adobe's legal team would sue them for linking. But now they don't. Will they now sue slashdot? Well, call them and we'll see.

Anyway. The 6.0 software doesn't exist. But if there is no spoon use the frok - use GIMP :).

There was one easter egg in version 1.0.x of The GIMP, introduced in 1998 by Adam D. Moss. It was rather hard to find because you had to use the DB Browser and see that one plug-in registered itself as "plug-in-the-egg" but did not appear in any of the menus. If you tried to invoke this procedure, it would display some pretty animations on your screen.

But a few weeks after this was added, it was taken out of hiding in the developer's version of the GIMP (versions 1.1.x), where it registers itself as Filters->Toys->The Egg. As Adam wrote when the hidden plug-in was revealed, I guess we need a new easter egg for version 1.2...

One acronym - one killer app:

GIMP.

It was ported by Tor Lillqvist in order to port the GIMP to Win32.
Being able to use the GIMP at home under FreeBSD and at work under Win32 helped me a lot this year with some serious documentation tasks where I used it for the illustrations together with Gnuplot (which I got to run under Win32 as well).

So much to the folks who cried traitor when it became public that Tor ported this fromidable program.

I just left a company that used the old StarView library to build Win32 and OS/2 application. Yes, some folks (here German banks) still insist on OS/2.

So that gave some real world lessons with a huge application built on a cross plattform GUI kit.

OK, we developers cursed StarView a lot, but this was mainly not because the class library was BS, but because we were left with the ~1994 source code of a further unsupported product. (Star Division continued with a new version that is the base for todays StarOffice, but this lib was never made public as the old one was).

While the source was available to us, that just enabled us to do changes at all. We did the 16bit to 32bit migration of the NT code base, the Borland to MS Devstudio migration, a lot of bugfixes and some enhancements to both NT and OS/2 versions we needed. Everytime it was a non trivial time consuming job to get it running. I would have prefered to have some commercial support.

Think of something very complicated that works most of the time, but if it is broken then it creates a lot of trouble because no one usually likes to touch it and is untrained with it.

Another point was, but was far less important than the functionality, that the applications turned out to look very old fashioned. You immediatley see that a lot of things happened to tthe Win32 and even the OS/2 native GUI in the last years. If our clients were not banks, were some mainframe stuff is still in use, we had certainly to work that aspect.

If I had gotten the task to convert our applications to a modern GUI like MFC or GTK or QT, heck, I probably would have had written a modern-gui to old-StarView interface layer, because of the sheer giant heaps of present code that use the old interface. So better have a good look at the structure of your intended X-plattform GUI before you start a large task with it. You might never have the chance to get rid of it, without starting to rewrite the app.

And similiar to the experience I had with Java, it was only seldom the case that I could just stick to developping under one operating system, eg Win32, and expect the version for the other platform, say OS/2 to need no fine tuning. There were issues with the fonts and other system specific glitches.

Please forget that it is not only the different GUI you have to face when working X-plattform. No it is different tools too.

A Microsoft Compiler under NT does not speak the same C++ as a Borland Compiler or Visual Age under OS/2 does. So if you want to use modern features like exceptions or even templates you are in for a lot extra fun.

My personal favourite for least headaches is using gcc together with GTK whereever possible.

Yes I still prefer C and C++. While Java seems to have matured a lot, I still consider it a joke for everything larger than an applet. Emacs does better as a X-plattfrom VM. :)

Checkout BookFace.com. Peter Mattis (of GIMP fame) is the CTO of Boookface, btw.

It's not 1985 anymore, and we demand higher quality from games today than any of these "classics" provide.

The moderators will probably say that parent is (f)lame-bait, but I'll take the hook, line, and sinker:

Those games are still fun. Graphics don't make the game; otherwise, the GIMP would be the hottest selling game. What makes the game is the fun factor. Super Mario Bros. was fun. Tetris® (1988 or so) was fun. And they're still played.

I *am* a web designer and writer, and a lot of the work I've done over the past five years *has* gotten imitated, for better or worse. For instance, oddly enough, the original Mozilla.org (http://www.mozilla.org) was copied from the simple HTML-and-CSS layout I did The Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org/): from the technique, to the color palette, to the crude four-pixel black outlines around content areas. Don't bother checking; the new Mozilla layout has evolved away from that original look, though it still bears trace elements of the original design. A lot of you probably do remember the original Mozilla layout. I'm sure when Roblimo saw it, he realized it was copied from http://www.webstandards.org and I think that's the kind of thing he was referring to in his overly kind introduction to my work.

Well, that's really interesting, but I'm afraid it's just not true at all.

I designed and implemented the mozilla.org web site. It was not copied from your site, because I've never heard of you, or your site. (I've never heard of your petition either, but that's another matter entirely.)

On the other hand, the mozilla.org web site is just not very complicated: how many web sites have you seen that have a menu on the left and content on the right? I'd say, ``most of them.''

If I was inspired by any site, it was probably gimp.org, but mozilla.org didn't end up looking much like that in the end.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

copied from the simple HTML-and-CSS layout I did

While I was in charge of mozilla.org, for that first year and a half, the site did not use CSS at all. Nor did it use any non-default font faces or sizes (except headings.) In fact, I was quite adamant that all documents on mozilla.org follow a style that rejected all the newest incompatible flavor-of-the-week bells and whistles that had shown up on the web in the last few years. I still care that documents be readable in Netscape 1.1. This was to the vocal dismay of people who were writing documents for the site, who thought that my insistence on consistency was an unnecessary hurdle for them.

You can read my style guide at http://www.mozilla.org/README-style.html.

and then spend $500 on photoshop for windows

Are you saying The GIMP isn't advanced enough yet? It runs just fine for me on Sindows 98.

x11(which generally is much too ugly for a mac user to stand

Or the Aqua themes for GTK and Sawmill that look so not ugly, Apple is suing?

lets see is it "#start x", "#start x windows", hmmmmm how about

How about gdm? 100% GUI from startup to shutdown.

# tell application "X" to open

Interesting... I wonder why nobody has made a CLI shell for Mac OS yet, based on AppleScript and the Open Scripting Architecture.

Isn't The GIMP GPLed? But its success never got mentioned. I personally find the GIMP to be 100% better and easier than any PhotoShop.

Many former photoshop advocats agreed that The GIMP is better after I showed it to them.

Isn't this a perfect example of the pluses of GPL Software?

I use GIMP, and while it's real powerful, it's rather slow (or, on fast hardware it is 'not as fast as it should be'). Still, every chance I get I plug GIMP... especially to those morons using *unregistered* Paint Shop Pro. Yes, GIMP also runs on Windows. Consider that my obligatory " external link for +1 moderation whore" comment.. ;-)

Anyways, Photogenics is a real FAST, dead sexy app for Linux. If you DO buy software for Linux... give it a serious look. I bought this at Linux World NY, and the last emailed beta was like 500ish *KB* and ran real fast on my now-modest K62.

I talked to Paul at the show.. real humble guy. I never used this on the Amiga, but I do see this as evidence that even though the 80's are over, the LITTLE GUY can still come out with something cool and unique. You probably wont see this on the software aisles.. and that's my point. Store software generally sucks (gee want the latest shovelware from Metacreations or whatever).

The unadvertised bit is Pg's toolkit set... he wrote his own so he could do straight compiles from the AMiga codebase. It's a pretty good toolkit and he should consider licensing it for other Amiga ports, or just general Linux users (it's an in your face reminder just how bloated Qt and gtk are).

The effects? They's nice. I especially like the automatic masking when layering effects, and the lens flare utility is real nice.

I still cannot believe this thing fits on a FLOPPY...

Have you even tried the development version of Gimp? Don't be so quick to judge. The development version (1.1.19 is the latest, as of this moment) is far more advanced than 1.0.x... It does actually allow you to have the toolbox horizontal instead of vertical. In fact, you can make it any size you want, and it compensates.

Plus, there are many thousands of more reasons you should be running the 1.1 series of Gimp (like tablet support, automatic export features, etc)

For more info, Visit Sven's Gimp 1.1 page. The page even has a picture of Gimp in a horizontal state. *g*

Creating lines - see my tutorial Creating outline boxes should be - Select Box, Edit/Stroke. Seth

Chances are, if you have an electronic copy of a photo, you've got access to ... some type of image manipulation program.

If you have access to FTP (AOL parental controls block FTP) at any of these sites, and you have a Unix-like system with X11 or a Windows 9x or NT system (it's been ported), "you've got access to" the GNU Image Manipulation Program, better known as the GIMP.

Chances are, if you have an electronic copy of a photo, you've got access to ... some type of image manipulation program.

If you have access to FTP (AOL parental controls block FTP) at any of these sites, and you have a Unix-like system with X11 or a Windows 9x or NT system (it's been ported), "you've got access to" the GNU Image Manipulation Program, better known as the GIMP.

BROADCAST2000!!

Everything you need to edit stuff from web content to film.

Don't forget the GIMP either. Works great for all sorts of effects if you know a little Perl.

Be sure and check out Sound & MIDI Software For Linux for a whole slew of audio tools.

The makers of Broadcast2000 have some great mpeg-2 encoding tools as well.

Use Linux for your project! It gives you total access to your media, it's stable and cheap. I've been using it to edit my documentary and I'm really happy with it.

You could also have them try the
Windows port of GIMP. I've used it a bit, and while I can't compare it to the native Linux version of GIMP, I can say I like it much better than Photoshop.

Likewise, unless you're Microsoft, you can't force anyone to use a particular widget set, UI, anything.

It's not clear you can even do that if you're Microsoft; one of the applications running on the NT partition of my home machine uses GTK+. (No, it's not the Gimp, it's Ethereal.)

There's also Qt for Win32 as well.

1. Poor user base. More people with Macs run MacOS than run LinuxPPC and NetBSD/macppc put togther. Should we all switch to MacOS then?
2. NetBSD can't read Apple Partition maps. True for the 1.4 release edition, but not true for -current (for the brave), or the upcoming 1.5 release (for the patient).
3. No support for Linux/PPC binaries. True, but only a valid reason if running LinuxPPC binaries is on your list of priorities. It's not a sign of lack of support on NetBSD/macppc's part, but yet another indicator that NetBSD/macppc is still in its infancy. And neither system can run MacOS binaries, so maybe we should all just switch to that?
4. 8-bit XServer - Blah. I don't recall running into this issue, but I'm not a graphics weenie. If you need to run TheGIMP or something like that, then yes, this is an issue.

I tried out both systems on a PowerBook 3400 last year. Both were okay for my purposes, (NetBSD/macppc was marginally superior for me), but trying to get X to cope with one pointer button just ruined the whole experience.

Once I get the hardware straightened out, I'll likely set up a desktop box to dual-boot NetBSD/macppc and Debian/PowerPC until one or the other has all the features I want. Since I lack any MacOS, installing LinuxPPC isn't likely to be worth the effort.

On the AA Project home page, there's a section on 'Software known to support AA'; and there, second on the list, is The GIMP. textmode GIMP! Waaahhh, that is so perverse. I greatly fear I shall have to play with this...

Native Win32 GIMP by Tor Lillqvist is hosted at: http://gimp.org/win32/, current version is Dec 18, 1999.
There (was) also a Cygwin version which uses an X Server, but it's home page has disapeared from GeoCities. The author was Craig Setera. Haven't heard of a Mac port yet. See Netlabs for an OS/2 port.

I've been using Tor's Gimp for 'bout a year and it just keeps getting better (GTK themes even!). Adobe PhotoShop is still more refined and easier to use overall, but the playing field is much closer to level. Can't say much about Corel PhotoPaint. We have it. I use from time to time, but don't like it much.

I use Corel Draw more than Adobe Illustrator, but that's mostly because of familiarity. CD is buggier (on windows anyway). There are a couple of libre vector drawing projects for linux begun, but I haven't had a chance to seriously check them out yet.

Maybee its just me but that stack of icons at the bottom of the screen reminds me alot of the panels in gnome or kde. And as far as anti alias support its coming along fine in the opensource world. And as far as high color icons and widgets that isn't an apple innovation, thats a tigert/mosfet/gtk/raster innovation. Not to mention all of the fine work of the creators and users of themes.org

The Second edition of the Gimp User's Manual is also reslesed under a free license (OPL).

The biggest difference is that you can get it in both pdf and html format and all chapters are avalible. I consider that publishing it in a html only is not so free. Only publish a subset is also to be considered not so free.

Why? Well as a reader you want to be able to print the whole book and and have it next to you when you deal with your projet. Maybe you also want to bring it with you and read it in your bed etc.

• Printing a book only published in html is a nightmare.(Just print the samba book and you will find out that it will not look that good)
• To only be able to print a subset and not the index and toc is not good because you will not be able to find what you are looking for.
• Bring your laptop to your bedroom is not a good solution. Just imagine waking up and find that you sleept on top of it (i.e it's broken) is not funny at all.

Still it a good thing that people and publishers let readers/users read the book for free. Me my self buy my books since paper format is always nicer. I also think you should buy your books (if you can afford it) since otherwise no one will write books.

The biggest thing is however to be able to choose, buy or download

This is interesting...

Set your browser to "prompt" before excepting cookies. Now view the SAP/Linux page. You'll notice that every time the animated tux .gif turns and looks at you a cookie message will pop-up.

To confirm the conspiracies that are now formulating in your brain, right click on the animated tux penguin and choose to view it (as in, view the .gif only). The cookies still try to set each time the penguin looks at you!

Now to see what happens when I open the .gif in GIMP...

How long would that last?

As long as they keep innovating and produce useful products. How long did Adobe sell Photoshop before the Open Source GIMP solution came along?

GPL is not inconsistent with profits, as RMS has pointed out several times. It seems to me that HP is moving in the right direction: release the basic set of components so that everybody can agree at the low level and everybody is free to innovate and implement new solutions on top of the platform. Then bet their business that they are the better innovators, that they understand the customers better than anybody else.

It might be scary for some managers, but I think that is the way of the future. Organisations will differentiate themselves on how well they understand their cusomers, and on how well they ca build customer loyalty.

Welcome to the New World (tm).

• Gimp - need I say more? Check out Linux.com to see what can be done in this excellent piece of software (blatent plug) also check out tigert.gimp.org
  
• StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc.
  
• Netscape, Mutt, and others...
  
• Loki, id, EpicGames, and more.
  
• DVD is starting to work in Linux (and there are DVD players for TVs btw)
  
• USB mice work in 2.2.x, 2.3.x has much better USB support
  
• Cut and paste works great here w/ all apps... select w/ left mouse button and paste w/ the middle one
  
• Red Hat and others have great installers, Debian has an excellent thing called "apt" to install programs and more after initial installation (and you can even upgrade your whole system in place)
  
• IBM has ViaVoice ported to Linux, and typing is still faster. *g*
  

I have also looked at the source code for many free projects such as GCC and GIMP and noticed that the code quality was quite low. For example, malloc() calls were usually unchecked (especially in GIMP). I have worked on commercial projects before, and checking malloc() is rule #1 -- if you happen to run out of memory while using GIMP, it'll blow up, where as commercial systems will simply fail to complete the current operations. If such a high profile package is of such low code quality, I expect the lesser profile packages are considerably more buggy.

Though it can be argued that the code quality in GIMP is low in places, I would just like to note that GIMP doesn't use vanilla malloc at all (well, almost), but the glib wrapper g_malloc. It doesn't need to be checked, because if the allocation fails, an error handler is automatically invoked. Thus, if the g_malloc call returns, it has succeeded.

Some plug-ins seem to use plain malloc, though. They should probably be fixed.

Lauri Alanko
nether@gimp.org

This info is buried in the "about the gimp" section of the gimp website. Gimp32 is at http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/.

I'd love to be able to use Gimp for everything but it seems like a lot to learn over again. If I'm wrong and there are good tutorials and books out there, please let me know
For starters try The Gimp Manual which in my opinion is quite well done. It might be considered a little outdated, but it's a great intro to the gimp.

Jeez, man. Pull your head out of your ass. I'm a poor college student with a small budget, and I'm no genius- but I can make Linux do wonderful cool things like play my damn StarCraft game whenever I find the need to. I can use it to write my term papers, my reports for French (because of the incredible internationalization) and all of my presentation crap. I'm not that exceptional- maybe you use the wrong distro if you can't get anything done on Linux.

I mean, what else do I need from a computer? I can do email, type my papers, make presentations (with the KOffice components, which are a blessing), do 2D and 3D graphic design (GIMP and Blender), use the Net with Netscape Communicator or Mozilla, program in various languages (C++, C, Python....), Instant Message with my friends, and play the greatest computer game of all time- StarCraft. What else could you expect from a computer? I don't know, but I also expect it to stay up for weeks and months at a time- which Windows FAILS at miserably.

Peace, and maybe it's time to re-check some of what you said.

By the way, I personally do not pirate. Heck, I even pay for shareware. The correct response to overpriced proprietary software is what the GNU project does - write a version as or almost as good, and distribute it freely.

For example, if you ever are tempted to pirate a photo or image editing suite, go download The GIMP instead.

Of course there are plenty of free TT fonts. If anyone out there ever used a damn search engine they would find more they anyone could desire.

First off, check with the experts on what looks good. And one of those people in the Linux world is Tigert. His webpage is tigert.gimp.org and it's pretty clean and simple. Look under Misc. Links and you will find several really great pages to get great looking TT fonts. Especially, that AcidFonts page.

If you want more after that then you are just nuts. :P

And if you want tt fonts in Linux. Just grab xfstt and install it. It literally takes something like 5 minutes. No fuss, no muss, it's just all good. For those of you that still don't believe in search engines. Go to freshmeat.net and use it's little search function. It will point you right to it.

And for a quick question. Since xfstt is working so great for me. Why, bother worrying about freetype?

I bought this book because it was the first one out on gimp at the time. But it wasn't very deep. It pretty much just describes obvious functionality with no real insight. In particular, I was hoping for some artistic insight into how to use the tools, but there was very little. It's not a terrible book and it might be useful to people with no knowledge at all, but I'd suggest reading the on-line Gimp User's Guide for detailed information. pat@pat.net