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Ask Slashdot: Switching To a GNU/Linux Distribution For a Webdesign School
spadadot writes: I manage a rapidly growing webdesign school in France with 90 computers for our students, dispatched across several locations. By the end on the year it will amount to 200. Currently, they all run Windows 8 but we would love to switch to a GNU/Linux distribution (free software, easier to deploy/maintain and less licensing costs). The only thing preventing us is Adobe Photoshop which is only needed for a small amount of work. The curriculum is highly focused on coding skills (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP/MySQL) but we still need to teach our students how to extract images from a PSD template. The industry format for graphic designs is PSD so The Gimp (XCF) is not really an option. Running a Windows VM on every workstation would be hard to setup (we redeploy all our PCs every 3 months) and just as costly as the current setup. Every classroom has at least 20Mbit/s — 1Mbit/s ADSL connection so maybe setting up a centralized virtualization server would work? How many Windows/Photoshop licenses would we need then? Anything else Slashdot would recommend?
Get mostly linux machines for the mainstream work, and get a few windows systems for the jobs that really need windows. People will have to learn the nuts and bolts of data transfer between the systems, but that is actually a pretty useful professional skill.
Licensing, for one. They'd need a license for each VM, which kind of defeats the purpose of switching to Linux for the sake of lower costs.
Not sure why this hasn't been mentioned yet, but depending on what version you want to run, Photoshop runs quite well on Linux under WINE depending on what version you need to use, including CS6 and Creative Cloud versions. If you require support, Code Weavers packages a popular and easy-to-use version of WINE with varying levels of technical support available for purchase. (No affiliation with Code Weavers, just a happy customer.)
If you want to get fancy (i.e. complicated), you can probably set up some sort of application server that will allow you to limit the number of Photoshop licenses you need to purchase, but that's a bit out of scope for a simple Slashdot comment. :)
- Dave
Evil is as eval("does");
You would also need a different server license for each old version of IE to emulate
Nope, IE VMs for testing are free....
Official VM's for testing IE versions are available from Microsoft:
http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/windows/
From the webpage:
"Download virtual machines: Test versions of IE from 6 through 11 using virtual machines you download and manage locally"
Slicing PSDs is crude, antiquated (even though most shops still do it), and reinforces the fallacy that web design begins in Photoshop.
Modernize your curriculum to teach progressive enhancement of wireframe layouts in the browser. At some point you teach about creating the individual image assets for what they are (backgrounds, icons, etc) rather than treating a PSD as a giant slab of source material. For this, you can use GIMP, Inkscape, or anything else Free.
You are perpetuating Adobe's dominance by furthering a bad workflow that benefits them. Your course isn't about Photoshop, that shouldn't be the keystone of it.
Slicing PSDs is the equivalent of beginning a construction project from a child's crayon drawing of the not-yet-existing building.
but we still need to teach our students how to extract images from a PSD template. The industry format for graphic designs is PSD so The Gimp (XCF) is not really an option
Really? Sure i'd chose photoshop over gimp, but i'd choose nether for web design... manipulating rasters for anything more than tweaking images should not be part of modern web design, slicing up images is 1990, don't teach this, design with grid systems, use pen and paper or a wireframing tool, teach typography, the rest is code.
Adobe WROTE photoshop for Linux YEARS ago, we actually used to run it, but it was a limited release application that was only provided to specific customers and beta test sites. There's just never quite been a critical mass to make it profitable to release stuff like that. Porting, if your a sophisticated shop that already supports several platforms is really pretty trivial.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Not a hobbyist.... for God's sake, don't trust this to a hobbyist.
I've seen some mighty capable hobbyists and some downright retarded experts. If you're looking to admin this on a budget, you're not going to get a windows *or* Linux expert. On the other side, a windows admin is likely going to be far less versatile than a comparably capable Linux admin. This is largely due to the fact that windows admins usually get taught, and Linux admins usually teach themselves. If you want a problem solver, which do you think would make a better candidate?
A linux hobbyist will probably be able to get the job done, just be prepared for it to take a little longer.
If you really want to try something different, replace all of those new PCs with RPi2's. Where I work, we have PCs on the manufacturing floor, but they have a realtively low life expectancy as they get pushed around a lot. I've been actively replacing them with Pi2's. At first, the admins were unhappy about it, but when the CIO found out how much were were saving by virtue of not having to replace $500 PCS all the time, I got the green light to replace *existing* machines before they were destroyed. The old PCs that still worked are now being re purposed and used elsewhere. Admining the Pi2s is pretty damn easy too, we have a master Image of the SDCard, and when something gets hosed, we just pop a new SDcard with a default image into the Pi, and off to the races. Even copying the images doesn't cost us much time anymore, since we got a 1 to 7 SDcard burner. Just plug em in, kick it off an 20 minutes later, 7 brand new boot cards...
Even an 8GB card has plenty of room on it for running a full LAMP server, X server, and all the Linux based tools. Granted you cant run unity (would you really want to?) and it would take a while to compile something hefty, but for most classroom type projects it would compile fast enough (I use them for doing compilation work, and the results are acceptable) and xubuntu is pretty damn easy to use considering how little resources it needs. With a little extra work, you could configure them to load a home directory from a single file server so that the students wouldn't even need to worry about loosing their work if they damage the Pi.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
WRONG.
This is an example of someone who has not explored the Linux alternatives thoroughly before deciding that since it is free it cannot possibly do the job. Or maybe he's going on what he heard a few years ago, and doesn't realize that major FOSS software like GIMP are undergoing quiet, continuous improvements and upgrades.
In either case, this is not an example of "a real problem with Linux, where some major and/or important products simply don't work and the open-source alternatives won't cut it." There are definitely still such examples out there, but this is not one of them.
Will
Inkscape's native format is SVG, and it works great. It should be part of the curriculum long before hand-holding designers who can't produce consumable assets.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
I'm a seasoned pro webdev and havent touched Windows or PS in years. Gimp does most of the gfx work just fine, especially with the modern flatty designs. As does Inkscape for the vector work.
I do use a mac though - less hassle with the gui and some neat tools unavailable on Linux (SourceTree, Kaleidoscope, Transmit, etc.) but those are tools you definitely don't need for learning.
My advice: ... Train your students on Atom or Brackets and learn and teach Grunt, Gulp or both and build a webdev pipeline with those. Build a pipeline that your students can take with them on their career. Way more worth than learning Adobe crap.
Move to Ubuntu LTS right now and set up one Mac Mini in every classroom if you must teach your students PS filters and the Adobe Suite. Although I wouldn't.
The one thing desperately missing on Linux is a FOSS Git gui that doesn't suck. You'll have to get a bundle licence for SmartGit - it's Java, but it's OK. As a full blow IDE Netbeans and the Netbeans Chrome extension + perhaps FF WebDev Edition are are the tools of the trade. All FOSS, all perfectly at home on Ubuntu.
For testing set up VBox on every PC and pull the official Windows Browser Webdev Testing VMs. They only run an hour before needing a virtual restart, but they're perfect for Testing IE and Spartan.
What ever you do, spare yourself and you Students the hassle with remote desktop.
Good luck with your business.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Let the graphics design industry use what it wishes. They can export to web formats, which is what you need.
I spent over thirty years in the computer industry, working on many projects with user interface and graphical elements, and not once did the graphics designers deliver what we needed in Photoshop-specific formats.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Depends on the license terms. Some of the cheap OEM licenses are only applicable when running bare metal on a particular machine. If you want to run them in a VM, then you may need a different license. If you get audited and are not in compliance then you can be hit with a very large fine, or you can go to court and try to get that clause in the EULA invalidated (good luck doing this for less than the cost of the fine). If you're going to run proprietary software as part of your business, then make sure that you factor in compliance audits and lawyer time reading the EULAs into your TCO calculations.
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I have some love for SVG... at least the sane parts of the spec, and it's quite a big part of my day job... But i have a lot of hate for inkscape:
A significant part of that is because it's really shitty at generating SVG. It might "use" SVG as it's format, but it does not treat it natively, it uses it's own name-space, litters files with it's name-space even when you request it to save plain SVGs. It converts much of it's data into SVG while saving the original "inkscape" data embeded in it's sodipodi namespaced XML embedded in the same file... really not very different from illustrator, SVG is it's output not it's internal format.
I don't touch files intended for the web with inkscape, but make them by hand, using inkscape to generate path data but that's it... Creating web safe SVGs with inkscape is just too much pain.