Hello,

I found a series of gimp tutorial videos and think they are very useful. You can find them here. The page also has links to other useful sources:

http://blog.meetthegimp.org/

Thanks!

Yay! I am on RC now ! not much different but it seems snappier .. but It may just be me :-) lol

I have now configured a pretty decent Gnome desktop with Lucid beta 2. However, I cannot figure out how to assign applications to specific desktops. I want mail to open in desktop 1, firefox in desktop 2, and so on. It must be easy, I just don't know the 'Gnome way'. In KDE I would just set it in the control panel.

Yeah, aptitude install kubuntu-desktop is all you need to do that trick.

It was Ubuntu. I am used to the look and feel of Kubuntu. My thinking was to install the Ubuntu version, as it is the 'real thing'. Then add KDE on top of that, and use whichever I wanted at the time. I still might go that route, I have done it in the past.

Sandpiper, was that Kubuntu or Ubuntu?

I did not like it at all! I thought the colors were very poor, the black at the top, in the title bar was really bad, and moving the max/min/close to the right was unreasonable. I also don't like the default theme. But it was a bad computer day. the internet seemed very slow today, and the update manager needed to get 312 MB of updates. That took a long time.

I got the min/max/close moved to the left so it is near where the scroll bar and cursor normally are. Changing the theme might help a lot. The software manager seemed very nice for choosing software, but not so good about telling you what will happen. When I asked it to install k-mail, it did not give me a clue about how many other things it would need. I knew it would need a bunch of KDE dependencies, but I think it should have given me warning that I was asking for a lot and it would take time. Some people might not have known that. That is my first impression, and my first impression is often wrong.

I bought a new hard drive today. That D300s finished off the space on my existing one. I have taken about 2500 photos with it in the last couple of weeks. I should not need LVM, there is no excuse except poor house cleaning that I have 16 partitions.

Sandpiper, cool, how do you like it? And using LVM (the Linux Logical Volume Manager) can help a lot with the partition limit issue.

Solid_liq, I just installed the 10.04 Ubuntu beta this morning. Have not booted to it yet, wanted to check what's up this morning before trying that. I also have to get a new hard drive, may add it as a second one. I have been up against the 16 partition limit for about a year, and need to do something. Plus with the new camera, I have used up my available space. So I have computer work to do!

Edit: I have 10.04 Ubuntu running, and am in it now.

It is an LTS version (the only kind I run, personally), and it's very nice IMO. I think Lucid is an apt moniker for it. They've really polished it up nicely. I'm not sure about the Kubuntu version, as when I tried KDE on it, it still had issues (I used to be a big KDE fan, but gave up on it when they didn't do anything to maintain the KDE 3.5.x series while working on KDE4 even though 3.5.x had lots of bugs). I found I actually really like how gnome works in Ubuntu, since Ubuntu fixed all the things I couldn't stand about Gnome in their distro's version of it. You might want to give the gnome-based version of Ubuntu a try too: you might find you like it. I'm pretty sure it's a lot more polished than the KDE desktop in Kubuntu, since Kubuntu is only an unofficial release.

That is not my problem. I have a failed dependency on gtkmm 2.14, which may be provided by gtk 2.12. I can't get those in Mint 8 from the normal repositories. When I switched to Kubuntu 9.10, I was able to add the needed package, and all was fine. I opened and ran rt for a short time. I can see it will have a learning curve.

I does show you are right about the benefit of Ubuntu itself vs a derivative. I may install Kubuntu 10.04 beta in the partition that kubuntu 9.10 is using, and start switching to that. It just occurred to me last night 10.04, it is April, the time is here! I think this is supposed to be an LTS version, so should be good.

You have to run the 'rtstart' command from where it unpacks, or add that to your menu. It needs to have a proper .deb file built, but otherwise, it's great.

I see I did download Raw Therapee, but it was a tar file, and not a complete package. It has a failed dependency. Also installed in my home directory, shades of windows! Think I will reboot to Ubuntu and look some more at this.

I think I may have tried in install RawTherapee in Mint and it did not install. I do need a good raw input app. I suppose I could try it in another distro. I think I have about 4 installed, maybe only three. Not sure. Think I have Ubuntu 8.10, Kubuntu 9.04, maybe something else. Might still have UbuntuStudio 8.04 installed.

I never used 2000 or ME. After 98, I tried XP. They were just starting to implement a multi-user system, if you have the grace to call it that. But it was such a mess I could not understand what they were trying to do. Real corporate networks are multi-user, so I don't understand why the standalone version was such an amateur job. Well, I should not be bashing Windows; to each his own. Linux has had its own problems since Ubuntu 8.04, nothing has measured up to that for use and stability. KDE is just starting to get back to where it works after the 4.0 nightmare; I still can't set different backgrounds for different desktops. :(

But I love my D300s, and am looking under rocks everywhere for an extra 10 grand so I can get a great birding lens. :)

LOL sorry to hear your troubles.. This forum is not the most stable.. nor the most full featured.. but it kind of grows on ya :-) I think its the people...

After a few more days with 10.4 beta 2 I find that its really much slicker esp with the Video compatibilities. Been trying out chromium web browser too.. its nice and fast but not compatible with some stuff i use which uses a lot of JavaScript so I am still on Firefox mostly. However The new Gimp that I installed on 10.4 is annoying the heck out of me at the moment. as it does not show a status bar for some of the long running tasks.. sigh.. I am using the history window to show me that the task is finished.

I will have a look at Raw Therapee. Thanks for the tip solid_liq.

The only issue I have with Linux for photo editing is that the monitor calibration support could be better, though it is improving (slowly). I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 daily right now on my core i5 laptop because it's the only version that supports the GPU built into this new CPU. Otherwise, I've been using 8.04 LTS on my desktop since it came out, and 6.06 LTS before that. Ubuntu works great, and is nice and stable. I used to use Redhat, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo, SUSE and Debian. I still use Debian for my servers, but Ubuntu is the best for the desktop. It's much better than its derivatives like Mint, too. You can get everything that's on Mint in Ubuntu, but since Ubuntu is much more popular, it's maintained much better. BTW, you wouldn't believe how much trouble I've had trying to post this and the previous message. For some reason, the website kept silently dropping my posts.

I've been on Linux since Redhat 5.1 myself. I barely used Windows 2000 after it came out, and switched to using Linux full-time once USB support came into Linux with the 2.4 kernel.

I can't believe no one has mentioned Raw Therapee yet. I think Raw Therapee is by far the best raw image processing software on Linux (although Bibble is nice too). Raw Therapee was just open sourced, though the 3.0 release will be the first official opensource release. It runs on Linux and Windows, and actually does a better job with raw decoding than Photoshop. If you haven't used it yet, give it a try. 2.4.something is the latest stable release, and there's an alpha release for 3.0 that shows a little bit of the updates to the user interface, though the algorithmic updates aren't in there at all yet.

heartyfisher said:
having quad cores is fun! I think I am set for the next 3 years :-) Might upgrade to the new 6 core CPUs later this year :-)

hahaha!

Ok my Ubuntu 10.4 beta2 is up and running !! Yay! Its almost twice as fast as my old machine but it can at least do 2 of the same thing at twice the speed!! having quad cores is fun! I think I am set for the next 3 years :-) Might upgrade to the new 6 core CPUs later this year :-)

Installing hugin as I type :-) should be fun...

@Sandpiper

I'm still rocking my Fedora install. (:

heartyfisher, one of the decisions on 10.4 was to remove Gimp, I think it allows space on the live CD for other more mainstream apps. Once you are booted with the live CD, you should still be able to add Gimp with the package manager. But that is sort of wasted effort. I am not sure how far you can push things with no swap partition. You probably have enough memory in the new machine that you don't need it. When you get the system running, add hugin, it works amazingly well, IMHO.

jonnyapple, thanks for encouraging me to give it a go with hugin on a real pano. I know I could have used portrait, but it would not have added much, as the depth of field is just too shallow for foreground and background to matter much. Plus I don't think I could have handheld it in portrait mode and got the overlap accurate enough. It is hard to keep track of just where you are doing it handheld! I'm not a pro, just an old guy with new toys.

Still trying to learn to operate the D300s and 80-300 kit zoom with these birds.

Very nice, Sandpiper! So, are those emus? [edit: Now I see you said they were cranes. Silly me.]
I'm glad I wasn't just making up what I was saying about hugin. ;-) I once did a full 360-degree pano at a funeral in a cemetery where people were moving between frames and hugin chopped some of them in half (but, to be fair, it was version 0.7.something). It ended up a lot more disturbing than I had intended, but at least I got a good laugh. Another tip (which you may have done anyway) is that you can get a taller pano if you shoot in portrait orientation instead of landscape. It would have also made this one 60 shots wide, though. ;-)

I am writing this from Ubuntu 10.4 beta2 ! ..Just booted it up :-) but the darn live CD does not have gimp like in previous versions. oh well I guess I will have to do a proper install tomorrow...

2 second review ? it feels slicker...

I just put together a basic quad core machine and booted up the new OS, I don't have a hard-disk installed yet!! :-) Coming tomorrow :-) Really amazing what you can do without a hard disk these days! 8-)

PS @ sandpiper : Really cool pano! I must try this software soon. I have some shots I took some time ago that was aimed at creating a pano but never got around to finding the software to do it.

I think I have been running Linux since Red Hat 6.2, maybe 6.1. Used that for a while, then Mandrake, then Suse, and now Mint (Ubuntu). There is no going back to Windows for me. The last version I seriously used was 98, and now I get rather panicked when someone asks me to do something on a Windows computer. I just don't remember the workings anymore.

Anyway, I went 'birding' this morning and ran another few hundred shutters click off the camera. In part, I did a handheld series of shots thinking I could try and make a panorama. When I got back home, and started looking at really doing the panorama, I found it was 41 shots. I doubted my computer had enough power to do that, but decided to try the whole thing and see what happened.

Loaded them all into Hugin, and after a bit of manual tweaking between two frames, it was able to crank out a nice panorama! It is about 35,000 pixels wide and 800 high, representing an arc of maybe 150 degrees, shot with a 300mm lens on the D300. It is a shot of about 600 Sandhill Cranes feeding in a corn stubble field. Somehow it seems Hugin "took care of it" when the cranes moved between exposures. It is not great photographically, I should have used a tripod, and the depth of field is inadequate for the subject. But I am still amazed at the resulting panoroma (warning, 6 MB file).

I have tried Gimp on windows and on Linux on the same machine and gimp on window is at least twice as slow...

@mb ; Lol I too was using floppies for linux.. how long ago was that! I kind of gave up after it needed over 30 floppies! I too started with slack but i have tried mandrake, mandriva, debian, suse, redhat, fedora, centos, puppy, PClinux, Gentoo and Knopix and a few others i cant remember.. :-) I can hardly believe i have tried so many, geewizz !