Slashdot Mirror
Canvas 7 beta for Linux - now available
As the title says - Canvas 7 Beta is now available for downloading. This version was ported and compiled using WineLib. RPM, DEB, and TAR.GZ files available (which covers all Linux Distros). Could anyone grab it and post their impressions? These days it seems that the graphics programs market for Linux is heating up :)
About 6 months ago I used to use this program, but they wanted to charge me $20US for bug fix update on CD ROM. -- The program would NOT OPEN without it, but barfed and returned an error message. A program's not much use if you can't open it. (I THINK it was 3.0.3 to 3.0.5) I know this was way old, but they couldn't just email me an upgrade (not on the web site either) I called them but their support rep's hands were tied. I don't use Canvas any more. Didn't have time to screw around, so I standardized on something else. I just hope they will SUPPORT their products in the future. Good luck to everyone I guess......
Alright, hands up everyone who said "Cool!", downloaded it, then thought "What is it?"
I grabbed it. Seems pretty stable & full featured for a beta. Imports & exports many formats. It's really a vector drawing program so it competes w/ the likes of sketch very successfully. It also seems to have a lot of page layout capabilities.
To run it I had to run their 'wineserver' first & then run canvas7.
Also make sure you use 'unmanaged' windows.
I decided to compare the way they use winelib to the way Wordperfect Office uses winelib. I altered the wpolauncher script to use unmanaged windows. That gives the windows a Win95 look & feel but it makes the WPO applications significantly faster.
Then I noticed something: Wordperfect Office uses wine, not winelib!
Check this out:
[jthomas2@bob programs]$ file wpwin9.exe
wpwin9.exe: MS-DOS executable (EXE), OS/2 or MS Windows
and
[jthomas2@bob programs]$ file prwin9.exe
prwin9.exe: MS-DOS executable (EXE), OS/2 or MS Windows
Compare this to:
canvas7: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
That explains why some of those corel office applications, especially their presentation app run so slowly!
Someone from Corel want to explain this?
Reality check guys: for the forseeable future, Windows will be the dominant platform. If WineLib is really getting good enough for vendors to port their software using it, then our chances of getting a load of the thousands of good Windows applications ported are greatly improved.
In fact, I could see the Windows API becoming a "commodity platform". That is, with the advent of Wine, we could be a approaching the point where Windows API programs will run in a lot of different places. Further, I can see Linux becoming a significant place to run Windows programs in the near future if Wine gets good enough.
I really think that anything that commoditizes the Win32 API is probably a good thing for the industry, even if we would all prefer native ports. The problem of Microsoft "extending" Win32 periodically would be greatly mitigated if this were the case.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Well, I agree it's better than /usr, but /usr/local is reserved for me to use (according to the FHS), and not for third party software to install into. It should install into /opt/canvas7.
That said, I personally have a shared /opt across all my boxen, so I've had to impose some structure on it. I'd want it installed in /opt/x86/linux/canvas7 (/opt/sparc/linux/canvas7 would be great, too, but I guess I'm being too optimistic there). Ideally, any RPMs should be relocatable to allow for setups like mine.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Wine does not work with XFree4.0, because of libpthread vs. Wine's own clone-based threading mechanism. See http://www.winehq.com for more details.
Btw., has anybody noticed that Paradox in WPO2000 somehow thinks there is a "D:\" somewhere?
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Corel wanted to use WineLib (and is still planning to for future versions of WPO), but g++ is not yet suitable for general Windows porting. (precompiled headers being probably the largest problem - gcc doesn't have 'em, so large C++ projects take forever to build, as anyone who's compiled KDE knows all too well).
:)
;-)
The problem is exacerbated because Corel's stuff is all based on MFC, and MFC in turn is heavily tied to Visual C++. gcc 2.95.x helps this out by supporting anonymous structs and unions, but the pieces still aren't all in place to do seamless Winelib ports.
Deneba OTOH writes their code in pure C++ with no class libraries (Canvas evidentally can compile on both Windows and the MacOS from a common codebase). They began experimenting with WineLib the last week of December (based on their emails to wine-devel), so they've made excellent progress in a short amount of time. Kudos to them
Disclaimer: I don't work for either Corel or Deneba. Everything in this post was picked up or interpolated from wine-devel mailing list postings. If someone from those companies wants to correct me, please moderate them up
Mine just crashes with an exception c0000005, which if I remember my windows programming is the standard "there is no variable there" error. I have a newly-upgraded redhat 6.2, and xfree 4.0. any simliar probs?
Well, since it requires Wine, and Wine requires Windows DLL's (I believe), I think non-Intel folk are out of luck. Does anyone know if the real (non-beta) version will be native Xlib or GTK or Qt, i.e., non-Wine?
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
Has anyone deciphered this line? It sounds like this says, "We let your window manager do what it's supposed to do and don't try to interfere", which is what it should do, but I've never heard it phrased this way.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
I have used Canvas in the past under MacOS. It is an excellent program.
However, I wonder if there is any plan to compile for Linux/PPC? (or other CPUs...)
--Mark
A) Yes it is cheap stable and flexible, but it is certainly not fast, (with something like GNOME and GTK or KDE and Qt)
B) I doubt artists care about flexibility. They use a standard set of apps for many years at a time. Even a version upgrade is traumatic for most.
C) NT is not unstable, nor expensive. I can get a copy of NT Workstation for $200, (or $50 from training books) plus it stays up for a week at a time. NT may crash in server environments, but on the desktop it usually is well behaved. And it rarely crashed to the point where you don't have time to save your work. Macintosh just got true multitasking with OSX and has innards even more modern than Linux. (MACH and BSD) Especially with Mach and its good threading model, OSX looks like a powerhouse media OS. Then, of course, there is BeOS. Fast, stable, flexible (app scripting rocks all hell), free. For a lot of artistic tasks that can get by with ArtPaint or Easel (addmitadly not cream of crop apps, but they're decent) it rocks. Then there is the near future port of the GIMP and the port of the 3D modeler nendo and Maxon's 3D app. If Be keeps the momentum it has now (500,000 downloads over the course of a few days) it will be in the big leauges pretty soon.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Under your logic MacOSX is still newer than Linux. Linux is still very classical UNIXish. Yes, BSD is older, but the design underlying Mach is newer. The system Linux may be new, but they system MacOS X is newer. They design is based on straight UNIX, while Mach is a newer offshoot. Either way, MacOS X is more modern.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You can read about it here:x /default.html
_ ____
http://www.deneba.com/dazroot/softlibs/cv7_linu
the feature list is rather long.
But basically, it's a bitmap/vector/publishing app for mac and windows and now linux!
_______________________________________________
Michael Cardenas
Lead Linux Programmer
Deneba Software http://www.deneba.com
hyperpoem.net
Since Canvas7 is a cross platform application, most of it is abstracted from the OS. In our testing, we found it to be relatively stable. But then again, it is our first beta.u lt.html
_ ____
We are hoping there there will be a good deal of feedback from the community to helping us make the app more stable. Towards that end, we've setup our own discussion forum for discussing issues with canvas for linux at:
http://www.deneba.com/dazroot/support/forumdefa
In our testing, we also found that a large number of the problems with Wine were rooted in window manager problems. To solve this we allow the user to select window manager settings according to the window manager they have. The user can also select an option to have the application operate without being managed by the window manager. This should eliminate a lot of the problems with stacking order that wpo has.
_______________________________________________
Michael Cardenas
Lead Linux Programmer
Deneba Software http://www.deneba.com
hyperpoem.net
Actually...
/.'ed ) the higher ups are going to decide what to do. And one possibility that has been discussed is a full native port. It all depends on the interest of the community, and the _company's_ ability to regain it's investment. Developers, boxes, cd's, artists, time, and bandwidth all cost money.
_ ____
Depending on the response to this release (and the response has obviously been great, we're totally
_So_ winelib has given us an entry door, to allow us to get into the market and feel it out. Anything that gets more software companies into the linux market has to be a good thing for linux right? Software companies have people who have 8 hours+ a day to spend making kick ass products. Be it on linux, or on any other platform that has the potential to give a good return on investment.
_______________________________________________
Michael Cardenas
Lead Linux Programmer
Deneba Software http://www.deneba.com
hyperpoem.net
If someone would like to help us distribute Canvas for linux by providing a mirror, please contact mbc@deneba.com
_ ____
Thanks!
_______________________________________________
Michael Cardenas
Lead Linux Programmer
Deneba Software http://www.deneba.com
hyperpoem.net
Wine does not *require* windows DLLs. It can load them for their native architecture (intel) if the application requires it. It also implements the windows API itself. Basically, if the program requires an external DLL, wine will load it. If it sticks to plain API calls (or the windows dlls the wine people have finished porting) it runs natively.
Since they're calling it a native version, I bet it's the latter.
Tetris rules.
Late me start out saying that this is great news. I use a Macintosh with LinuxPPC on one drive and MacOS on another. It is the very fact that I have to be in MacOS to use Canvas that keeps me from using LinuxPPC as my default system.
I heavily rely on Canvas for techinical illustrations in my research documents. I draw them in Canvas (6 -- haven't bothered to upgrade to 7 yet), convert them to EPS, and include them in my LaTeX documents. I can draw the graph of a complex 20 state finite automata in 5 minutes with this program. For what I do (your results may vary), there is simply nothing like this program currently available for Linux.
GIMP is a wonderful program, but you must understand what its purpose is. GIMP is an image manipulation program. It is meant to be a freeware replacement to Photoshop. It is for manipulating bitmapped images (Of high resolution) and performing cool effects on them.
Canvas, on the other hand, got its start as a technical illustration tool. Sort of like a poor man's CAD. In many ways it is closer to xfig, though its interface is far superior. All objects are represented as vectors unless they are draw within a image box (A bitmap object). This gives Canvas several features that GIMP is sorely (At least in the stuff that I do) lacking.
Geometric objects (Circles, rectangles, beziers) in Canvas are not bitmapped and hence can be rescaled on the fly with no jaggies or need for antialiasing.
While I am sure Slashdotters will correct me, I believe that object placement in GIMP is visual. You cannot select an object and type in a coordinate for it to move to. You can do this in Canvas relative to your current measurement unit (Points, centimeter, inches, whatever). This allows you to align objects so they will print correctly, as screen resolution is simply not good enough for press.
Text support in GIMP is just too primitive; this is my primary complaint with this program. In Canvas, text remains text. You can always reedit the text after you have bent it around a line, filled it with a gradient, rotated it 234.5 degrees, or whatever. And when you export the image to PDF, the text is still editable there. This is particularly important to me as various publications have different font requirements and I do not want to have to redraw my pictures.
With Canvas 5, Deneba extended their product from a technical illustration to tool to an All-In-One tool. It now can do a lot of what Photoshop does, and hence does compete directly with GIMP in that regard.
As far as I know, Canvas can now do everything that GIMP does. As to how well it does all this (compared to GIMP, Photoshop, or whatever), I cannot tell you that. I just do technical illustrations, not image manipulation.
-Walker