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I was having problems with something in Feisty, which was obviously fixed in Gutsy because I can’t remember what the problem was after the hour so of the upgrade had passed. And it all worked from then on… Well there must have been some reason I decided to do it, and I am sure something was not working… anyway as there’s only a couple of days left before Gutsy is released, I figured I might be pretty stable by now so minimal risk.

I wasn’t disappointed.  A couple of third party bits needed re-installing, specifically vmware and nero, but apart from that it all went well. XGL and compiz still worked (however the original Feisty compiz-config needed removing and re-installing) and you even get a nice little message telling you not to run the XGL session as it will just work in the gnome one.

Blinging your desktop has been integrated into a nice easy to use Appearance dialog under settings:

The new Screen and Graphics section doesn’t look to exciting to windows users, but it’s a god send when trying to use your laptop for presentations, at last an easy way to handle multiple monitors and resolutions.

More to come as I find stuff worthy of my attention, but to the Ubuntu team, bloody well done, it was such a smooth upgrade….

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’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.

Say no more….

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Where source is old extension and dest is new extension, in terminal type:

for x in *.source; do mv “$x” “${x%.source}.dest”; done

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Instructions on how to install the default UbuntuStudio theme in other Ubuntu distros.

http://www.belutz.net/2007/05/11/installing-ubuntu-studio-theme/

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All the free software as you can eat ;0)

http://www.getdeb.net/browse.php

It’s getting a bit retro now, but here is a superb matrix screen saver that imprints the film characters within the matrix.  It’s a lovely effect to see animated. Available for linux and windows.

http://knoppix.ru/matrixgl.shtml

Installing Compiz Fusion instructions

http://forums.opencompositing.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=131

Testing Automatrix out, claims to be a simple application installer, looks good after first impressions.

Tried installing google earth and it wanted to install in the home/user folder rather than /usr/local/google/google-earth  not sure I like that.  Need to re run with sudo.

Picasa installed perfectly and worked straight off. So did acrobat reader.

Some of the other interesting bits include, gdesklets, xDVDShrink, Apatana, VMWare and others.