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Photoshop in Linux Thanks to Disney
miladus writes "eWeek
reports that Walt Disney's feature animation unit (along with 2 other
unnamed studios) are using Adobe's Photoshop in Linux. They use the Wine emulator
to run the software and the 3 studios 'not known as team players, all
three agreed that a project that would benefit the entire open-source
community while delivering a technology they needed--was worth their cooperation'."
to run photoshop. Was this not previously possible?
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Running Photoshop on VMWare has even less to do with running Photoshop in Linux that running Photoshop running on Wine.
It's still a Windows application running on an implementation of the Win32 API. Which means it's not a Linux application, it's a Windows application that runs in an emulator. So what?
My journal has hot
Photoshop is probably one of the things that kept Apple going in the dark times. With Photoshop working on Linux there is little reason for a lot of people to stay with windows. This won't make anyone suddenly aware of Linux, but that's because most graphic designers are smart enough to be able to weigh their options. This is why Apple has such a large market share in the design world compared to the consumer world. This probably won't be the killer app for Linux, but it's a VERY big step in the right direction.
Help I'm a rock.
I'm glad to see this sort of thing happening, but I am a little disappointed that Adobe didn't port its code to linux natively.
Using Wine will nodoubtedly help many companies using linux. And it will make the decision easier for many companies that want to use linux, but are worried about compatability issues.
My hope is that Win will carry us through the transition phase until software manufacturers just compile a linux version of their product.
The problem now is that companies won't switch to linux because their aren't enough programs supported on linux. But software companies won't develop linux products because there aren't enough companies using linux. It's a deadlock. But if Wine can make the first crack in the floodgates, the whole thing should crumble. If there are already a bunch of photoshop users running linux-wine, Adobe is much more likely to issue a linux port of their code. Which in turn makes it easier to go linux with your company!
And soon enough, all the software companies will compile their linux distrubutions, and then, if enough people ask for it, alter the code so it can be compiled for Windows.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
No. Disney non-supporting Open Source,
as it has always been.
Now, instead of using, and helping
improving The GIMP, "linux people"
will just run their pirated Photoshops
and be happy, as oftenly such users
do not know the difference between free
and proprietary software.
-><- no
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I'm sorry, but Linux needs photoshop. That is one of those programs that some people actually earn their living using. The GIMP is nothing compared to photoshop. It may work for amateurs, but even people who use it as a major hobby could not get the same results with GIMP.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Why does it takes an EVIL company to do the right thing????
Ahh, but you're missing the point entirely. This is one of the major strengths of open-source from a corporate perspective. If there is something in an open-source package that does almost what you need, you pay a development team to add the feature in, then you "contribute" your changes back to the open source project, and they maintain it, at no cost to you. Developing software is relatively cheap when compared to maintaining it over a long period of time. So Disney was smart, and they got a feature they needed for relatively little money, and will continue to get it, and updates to it, for free.
Evil or not, they're not stupid, and it perfectly illustrates why open-source is a good investment for companies.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
Disney is just doing what it has always tried to do: Increase shareholder value. If they had decided that it was more cost effective to run all of their workflow on windows they would have done it. Linux is the best of the money according to them so they use it.
Yeah, but GIMP sucks to use when you compare it side-by-side with Photoshop. Sure it can do a lot of the same things, and suffices for most Unix users when there is no better alternative. It still clunks like a square-wheeled rickshaw.
It's true; I could typeset my documents with Emacs and LaTeX. That fact doesn't stop me from using Word though.
Getting popular applications like this running on Linux is the single most important thing to get Linux on the desktop.
Note that Adobe could probably release a native version of Photoshop to run on Linux fairly easily. They had a Unix version, and also of course it will run on OSX, so going native to Linux can't be that big an issue.
Everyone who wants to see Linux on the desktop should be pestering the companies of the software they use to release a Linux version. For me, the important one is Macromedia Flash, so I've been emailing Macromedia asking when they are going to port it. If you want to see Linux on the desktop, start pestering!
I've been using Photoshop since the 2.5 days (pre layers -- when real men [and women] used alpha channels) on Macs. I then switched over to using pshop on the PC because, well, I couldn't afford a mac!
But then, something strange happened. I had been using Linux (Redhat) as my OS-of-choice at home and would switch to my laptop (running 2k) to do Photoshop work. Out of the desire to use my mouse, I went and sunk a few bucks and bought the crossover application (commercial version of wine) and whalla! Photoshop 6 runs on my linux box, and faster!
So, now I can use Photoshop with my mouse (instead of that annoying touch-pad). The only thing that is a little annoying is that the focus of the tool bar and the other pallets take away from the canvas, so if you click on the marquee tool, you have to "double click" on the canvas to get the focus where you need it. Not a big deal, just a "thing."
sad robot making broken music
Speed is not an issue with my setup at all. I have installed Photoshop 7.0 with no windows dlls at all in wine's fake_windows setup. The install ran perfectly for me. Pop in the cd, mount it, and run "wine setup.exe"
:-)...
The actual execution of Photoshop has been perfect so far. I have used various builtin filters (but not all) with no problems. Saving files is quicker on Linux than it is on Windows, but then again, I have my drive hdparm'd to the max
Oh, btw, I'm running this on a PIII 500mhz w/ 128 meg of ram... not really a high end machine. Again, I have had no real performance issues with running Photoshop under Wine.
BTW, I am using wine-20030618
In general WINE is no slower than native Win32, and in many cases is actually faster! Remember WINE is Not an emulator, it is a reimplementation of the Win32 API native to Linux. The Linux guys often do a better job on the reimplementation then the origional coders =) Not sure where the slowness is for mirc, but I know that the mirc code uses almost none of the standard API calls so it's possibly something that is broken in WINE. Btw why run mirc under WINE when there are so many native IRC apps?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Give him a fresh juicy apple, and he complains that you should have instead figured out how to make the worm in the last apple tastier.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Also remember that disney is editing 35MM film, 24 frames per second, at ungodly resolution. They probably have this stuff running on a 4 way or 8 way workstations. Multi-head licenses for windows are STEEP. Microsoft also takes you out the ass for large-scale file storage. The cost per workstation probably includes the cost of the server divided over the number of users.
With Linux you are paying for the hardware and the photoshop license.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I've been running it for awhile and it works great. There's slight window redrawing problems, but that's just fluff. The meat of the program is solid. Check out the demo version is you have any doubts. Worth the money.
No, Adobe decided that they could not compete with Final Cut Pro and said so in a press release that had so much spin that people interpreted it to say that they were getting out of the Macintosh space.
.one in which everyone on the mac side was holding out of Photoshop 7.
Why would Adobe even consider getting out of the market that they earn most of their money in? For the first time ever their sales between Win and Mac were even last year... a year in which NO major version of any Mac software came out..
I have not taken many business courses, but abandoning half your revenue does not seem like a course of action they are likely to take.
Just this:- I think this should be credible enough for Adobe to look at a Linux version of Photoshop. After all, two of its large corporate customers, DreamWorks and Disney, are already using it.
More than mere navel gazing.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Wine IS a Win32 subsystem emulator. It is not a x86 emulator that you must purchase Windows to run on top of it.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
An application doesn't bestow one with talent no matter how well it's written.
But it can be a tool that makes a talented person's life a hell of a lot easier.
A talented carpernter may be able to build a house with a Bowie knife and 20 acres of forest, but its not exactly the quickest and easiest way of doing it, especially if there are commercial demands and deadlines to meet. Sure, you're pure "artist" could render Finding Nemo with a #2 pencil, but how long would it take him.
Personally, for the amount of PSing I do (bad Fark contests) the gimp and PS (or PS Elements) is a wash (mainly because I suck eggs). BUT... from the folks who do some sort of graphic design for a living almost all of them swear by PS, and quite a few of them have dicked around with the GIMP as well. To a (wo)man they all say it just isn't as good of a tool to get the type of work done in a timely manner.
Does Gimp support CMYK, like Photoshop? Do you know it is REALLY important if you are doing graphics for a living?
That's not the issue here. The issue here is that the Gimp GUI is so braindamaged that it is almost like the authors deliberately designed it to hinder whatever it is you want to do with the program.
Please, please, please tell me this. WHY THE FUCK does Gimp have all of its image processing functions in a goddamn right-mousebutton pop-up menu that hides the image you're trying to process in the first place? Jesus Christ! You couldn't make a worse design even if you tried.
And it has not been fixed just because of the attitude you show here. "Oh yeah? Our system is counterintuitive? Well, boy. There's only one thing I can tell you: just take your time learning our GUI because there is no way in hell that we would stoop as low as using the same GUI the people are familiar in the first place."
BOO! TERRO
On a related note, I'm still kind of surprised that Adobe wouldn't port Photoshop over to Linux even for a company with as much clout as Disney. Seriously, I realize it's a LOT of work to port an app that massive, but if basically every animator who runs linux wants it, why not? Catering to your customers is definitely part of a good business model.
Catering to your paying customers is a good model. The majority of the people who are interested in paying for Photoshop are probably not going to be using Linux. Sure there are people who want to use Photoshop on linux, but not enough willing to pay the 600 bucks per copy for them to recoup the development costs. And while it is not a fair bias, the Linux community is often seen as people not willing to pay for software. When presented with this, why would adobe ever release Photoshop for Linux.
Ultimatly, this news totally benefits Adobe. Now they know that they DON'T have to develop for Linux because it works well under Wine. They can just sit back and reap the profits from selling Photoshop to Linux people. And the best part is, they don't have to support the software.
"Hello, I'm having problems with Photoshop"
"What operating system are you using?"
"Linux under..."
"I'm sorry, we don't support Linux. Have a nice day.
click
It's ingenious really.
Slashdot...it's like Fox news, but without the biased sl...or maybe not.
That would make GIMP the fine set of brushes, oil paints and canvas. And people like you, hacks.
What a pompous load of shit. This is like arguing that artists who buy ready-made oil paints are just hacks and real artists gather minerals in the field and grind their own pigments by hand.
Yes, you can do in GIMP most of what you can do in Photoshop, but the simple fact of the matter is that you can do it more quickly and easily in Photoshop. If you're a prima donna fine artist (or fancy yourself one, which sounds like the case here), then you can afford to screw around with whatever tool floats your boat. If you are a commercial artist, you are generally producing "art" to satisfy the specifications and budget constraints imposed by a client who doesn't give a rat's ass what tool you use as long as the end product is on time and under budget.
Which is why commercial artists tend to have mortgages and car payments and fine artists tend to have attitude problems.
The GIMP is on a par with Photoshop 3 or 4. Those who say otherwise need to become more familiar with the current Photoshop featureset. This is all painfully familiar of the whining I used to hear from TeX users about how Word didn't do such-and-such that TeX did, when in actual fact Word did have the feature in question.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Adobe != Microsoft.
Getting more apps to run on Linux (even if through Wine) gives a path to follow to wean a company away from Windows slowly instead of the daunting all-at-once switch that they aren't willing to go for. It's much like the inverse of installing Unix Services for Windows. The purpose of that isn't to help unix - it's give companies using unix a path to leave it slowly.
If Windows as a platform is no longer needed because it's apps can run elsewhere, then companies can start using linux for everything, and THEN native ports become economically feasable after the install base is there.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Because it already has a Windows render farm capability
"I already have a CPU in here, why would I need another one?"
I guess you've never edited a 200dpi poster
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