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Corel Draw 9 for Linux Needs Beta Testers
Frank249 writes "Corel Draw 9 for Linux appears to be on or ahead of schedule. They are currently advertising for beta testers. This is a good sign and confirms what was reported in today's ZDNet Linux article, that the wine libraries are close to production quality."
Anyone who thinks that the Gimp is better than Photoshop has never had to do any real press work with it.
At the beginning of 1999, Corel said they'd have a Linux Corel Draw port 'by the end of the year'.
It was on my list of promised things by the end of the year, that didn't come out then. In fact, one of the only ones that did, was the Opera Browser Beta.
This is the most frequently asked question of all. Wine does not and cannot support .VXD/.SYS kernel-mode device drivers (this includes all winmodems). Whine at your laptop/modem maker for Linux support - at least Lucent has put out a binary-only module for their winmodems. And work is ongoing on a "generic" Linux winmodem driver - see www.linmodems.org.
Things like:
CD-ROM Drive & Speed
Monitor Make & Model
Pointing Device
Sound Card
Network
Some of the questions sound suspiciously like Marketing information, but that's just my opinion. I remember they had the same questions on the WordPerfect Beta application.
Why does Corel care what Sound Card I'm using?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
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CorelDRAW is vector based, while Gimp is raster based...
A better parallel would be drawn by saying "Why would anyone buy PHOTOPAINT when Gimp is already available for free?"
Corel has been pushing PhotoPaint as a PhotoShop competitor, and porting it to Linux makes Gimp a competitor too.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Huh? Nearly Identical?
About the only thing Photoshop and CorelDraw have in common is working with Graphics. Other than that, they're nothing alike. CorelDraw is closer to Illustrator in functionality than Photoshop.
Have you ever even USED CorelDraw?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Because if they did they would at least have made a token effort to clean up the form, after the flood of negative comments it inspired last time. This time, I just went into the site and checked out the form first before looking any further. Hasn't changed much, if at all. Sorry, I haven't got time for that. There are about 36 mandatory fields - it's just too much, and then you're only getting a chance being picked. Plus, I'm just a little reluctant to give them my telephone number. At least they didn't ask for my credit card.
Corel's goal should be to qualify their beta testers without annoying people. They certainly haven't achieved that. Now, I'd be most impressed if somebody from Corel showed up on the thread and asked us how the form could be better, since it's obviously widely hated.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
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.
Muahahaha! KIllustrator can replace either of these and leave them totally in the dust.
Okay, I'm kidding, KIllustrator is still in a pretty early stage, but it's an interesting project. I'm keeping an eye on it.
Here is the product page.
Corel probably can't afford to completely rewrite their office suite, they're using Wine to avoid binning all their old code. And since wine is x86 specific, that means they can only deliver x86 apps. (A native x86 FreeBSD version, on the other hand, would probably be quite straightforward for them to produce. But FreeBSD can run linux binaries, so they probably won't bother)
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
This is mostly a comment to those of you following this thread that do not have a background in graphic design. There are two things that I think you should know, First Corel Draw is vector graphics program, not a bitmap program like the Gimp. What this means is that Corel Draw is for designing graphics from the ground up (Take a look at any flashy product box, most boxed software for example, that graphic was probably drawn with either Corel Draw or Abobe Illustrator). The Second important thing I think you should know is about the whole Adobe Illustrator vs. Corel Draw thing, this is the Vi vs. Emacs debate of the graphics world, they are both good products, but different.
Isaac
Just wanted to say AMEN TO THAT BROTHER. While I freely admit I'm more fond of Adobe than Corel (That's what I learned on, and the curve was too high to backpeddle), I hate having to boot into Windows for Homesite.
I can understand laying out a site in Windows, and being sure to save every 10 minutes or so (gotta love PSD layers), if all I'm doing is plugging out code, than I want Homesite. It's the only REAL reason I use Windows anymore.
Note to Allaire: "port it, and they will come."
Maybe I'm waaaaaay off base here, but doesn't M$ own some of Apple???
Not trying to be TOO nitpickity, but if you were an anal bastard like myself, you could chock another one up to Uncle Billy...
I'm so happy with this annoucement!
I am *gasp* a Web designer and have been pineing for a solid OS/Design App package that ends the M$ pain.
Soon I can uninstall windows from my workstation and liberate myself to do *real* work.
While I love Photoshop and Illustrator, the fact that it runs only on a M$ operating system has been a major source of fustration when dealing with a deadline and having to recover from a crash.
I'm not too fanatical about the quality of Corel's design apps in regard to interface design and stability. Yet my hope is that it will get Adobe's attention and port Photoshop and Illustrator over to Linux.
Corel's Belair says that one component of Wine -- its compatibility libraries used for porting applications from Windows to Linux -- are near ready for prime time, and that Corel plans to beta-test production-quality versions of those libraries within a few weeks.
For me as a developer, this is the holy grail. When I need full speed performance, I have a full non-MFC C++ foundation class library that I use to create my Windows apps, and I haven't had the time (read: I gotta make a living too...) to port it to Linux. If I can use these libraries to port my libraries to Linux even semi-effectively, I no longer have any reason to code for the Windows GUI.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
This is excellent. I'm a web designer (creative talent reads /., too!) and am in love with Corel Photo-Paint (part of the Draw package) in particular. Right now I have to run NT if I want to use it, but the fact that they're releasing it on Linux is great.
First off, IMHO, Corel's products beat the pants off of anything Adobe makes. Foremost in the Corel arsenal is the fact that all of their interfaces are completely customizable (layout and button-wise, not skinnable). The bitmap editing tools in Corel are much more powerful than those in Adobe's stuff.
Now that a big-name, main-stream graphics app is coming for linux, maybe I can finally switch over permanently. Now, if only I could get Homesite for Linux, too...
It's so cold here in Ottawa, the developers must be choosing to work overtime so they can put off going out into the wind and snow.
"On the other hand, the early worm gets eaten."
I can't believe the number of clueless posters on Slashdot today who don't know what the fundamental difference between a vector illustration program and a bitmap graphics program or where one might be needed instead of the other. If Corel were to read the mindless postings of some of these clueless users, they might not even bother with the port of this and other packages. If they do read these posts I hope they read down far enough to read my post which is screaming ... Hey guys, there are real graphic artists out there who desperately need to be free of the Windows OS. Anyone who has ever attempted to do any vector illustration under Linux will tell you that this application is sorely overdue. The only promising applications that I've seen native in Linux are GYVE and Killustrator and both are a very (very) long ways off from being as functional and feature packed as CorelDraw 3 which came out about 5 years ago (which incidentally, *is* available for Linux at the over inflated price of about $500 dollars last time I checked). What would really be nice is if Adobe would get with the program as well and offer up a Photoshop version of Linux. Anyone who says that Gimp is better than Photoshop has never tried to use Gimp in a real pre-press or final-press application. There are not even Pantone matching available on the Gimp which means it's not even in the race. Hopefully Corel and Adobe will read the sensible cries from real business users and do the right thing, which is give us the Linux ports we need to be free of the Microsoft monopoly.
What does CorelDRAW provide that GIMP doesn't (or couldn't)?
CorelDraw 9 is actually a small suite of packages, including CorelDraw, Corel Photo-Paint, a font navigator, a texture explorer, a bitmap-to-vector tracing package and various image distortion tools. So, to answer your question, the functionality provided by CorelDraw 9 that the GIMP doesn't do is vector-based artwork, rather than pixmap. This is still an area of the Linux application base that is not fully up to speed yet - there are various applications which do vector-art/vector-design on Linux, such as Dia, Sketch, KIllustrator, Xfig (ancient but still useful) and it's successor GTKFig, GYVE and Impress but many of these are as yet incomplete or have fallen by the wayside. That's not to say that CorelDraw 9 is necessarily the best vector art package out there - I'd like to see the latest Adobe Illustrator on Linux too - but it is a welcome filling-out of the application base.
There are several things in the Windows package which it will be very interesting to see what Corel do with regards to porting them, or if they are simply ommitted. For example, the MS Visual Basic for Applications scripting language used for automation of CorelDraw 9 - drop or replace? - and the Digimarc Digital Watermarking software, something I'm currently unaware of anything like this on the Linux platform. Plus the usual glut of a thousand TrueType and Type1 fonts you get with any vector or DTP package these days.
Whether Corel Photo-paint 9 holds a candle to the GIMP (I don't honestly know, since I haven't used Photopaint since v5) is vaguely irrelevent, since it is the vector art package in this lot that will probably be of most interest to most people.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Corel Draw is illustration software, and The Gimp is image manipulation software. CD is for artists to draw images - you can draw circles, lines, curves, etc, and they're all resolution independent. Gimp lets you modify a bitmap - it's heavily resolution dependent.
Corel Draw is like Adobe Illustrator, and The Gimp is like Adobe Photoshop. Of course, CD and Illustrator do have bitmap capabilities, but nowhere near as powerful as PS or Gimp.
The idea is to use both together.
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