Archive for September, 2007

I am pleased to announce the release of version  1.0 of Unique Theme Studio for UIQ3. See www.unique.lummie.co.uk for more information.

So you want a cross platform Adobe Photo Shop that runs on linux ? Then look no further for an application that is at least as functional as CS2.

Pixel Image Editor

Pixel is running following platforms now: Windows, Linux/x86,
Linux/PPC, Linspire, Zeta/BeOS/x86, QNX/x86, FreeBSD/x86, MacOSX/PPC
and MacOSX/x86, MorphOS/PPC, eComStation, OS/2, SkyOS and DOS.

At the moment as it’s still pre v1.0 (not that you would know) it costs only $38!!!! with free upgrades up to version 2.0 and the license to run on any platform

Having used photo shop the interface feels totally natural. Everying is set out similar and there a few nice enhancements as well.

Some of the features:

Core

• Pixel is an extremely small and fast application
• it is easy to translate to any language as it supports full
  Unicode, all available translations are available at once (English,
  German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Slovak, Croatian, Swedish, Polish,
  Russian, Hungarian, Afrikaans, Brazilian Portuguese and others)
• supports TWAIN compatible scanners, digital cameras
• supports SANE compatible scanners, digital cameras and others (Linux, BeOS, eComStation)
• pressure sensitive tablets support
• printing support
• multiple color managed clipboards
• various image formats handling (GIF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PSD…)
• support for JPEG-2000 format
• support for OpenEXR format
• EXIF support

Image editing

• support for layers, paths, channels, masks and selections
• Color Management support for RGB, CMYK, Grayscale and CIE Lab modes (8-bit and 16-bit)
• support for HDR (High Dynamic Range) images with 32-bit/channel
  precision, HDR images in Pixel are editable in full HDR quality, not in
  8-bit RGB as in competiting programs
• realtime live effects for layers (adjustments, effects), sets of live effects can be saved as layer Styles
• image browsing and searching
• powerful text editing with spellchecking and support for IME/XIM (Asian languages)

Retouching

• includes variety of brushes, including full-color brushes and animated brushes
• brush retouching tools including special effects
• retouching set of filter plug-ins

Web features

• complex support for image slicing and image optimizations (GIF, PNG, JPEG, WBMP)
• direct editing of generated HTML code without destroying user’s additions
• support for clickable maps
• support for small animations for your web pages (animated GIFs)

I’ve built a UIQ3 Theme editor, it will be released soon.
See www.unique.lummie.co.uk for more information.

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As default USB drives in Ubuntu are optimised for performance, i.e. when data is written to the drive it is cached.  When you unmount or eject the drive, you usually get a notification to wait whilst data is written to the drive.

After searching a bit on the net I found that you can add a couple of options to the device, sync and dirsync that cause the data to by written synchronusly rather than caching it.  I have been running with this option enabled and it seems to work.

When I now eject the drive (NOTE: You still need to unmount / eject else you get a warning!) it ejects straight away without the please wait whilst the OS clears the  cache.

To set the option install gconf-editor if it is not installed via sudo apt-get install gconf-editor or synaptic package manager.

run gconf-editor from a terminal or choose Applications > System Tools > Configuration Editor.

Navigate to System > Storage > default_options

I added the option to the vfat section, which covers most usb flash drivers because they are Fat16 or FAt32.

I have not tried it with the ntfs etc, as I still want ubuto to cache writes to my ntfs partitions.

In the right had side, double click the mount_options item to bring up the editor

Click add, and enter
sync
choose Ok.

Click add, and enter
dirsync
choose Ok.

The options are now added. Click Ok to close the key editor, and close gconf-editor.

You should now be cooking on gas…

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I’m running Ubuntu with an XGL session and Compiz, and tried installing ArgoUML a java based cross platform UML designer. However when the application was run, the main window did not render correctly, it was blank with no menus or content.

A friend informed me of the solution, which affects Netbeans IDE as well, so the following:


sudo gedit /etc/environment


Add the following line

AWT_TOOLKIT="MToolkit"


save and close.

You may need to restart the session or reboot to pick up the environment setting change.

I have added a gallery to the site, mainly to share images that I think make good wallpapers for your desktop. Please feel free to download and use the images for non commercial purposes.