Linux for Designers

Normally wallpaper collections are a lot of crap, but Smashing did again a first and secound nice job.

Last week the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 took place in Wroclaw (Poland). Now video streams of the LGM conference, presentations and workshops are available online.

UPDATE:And a lot of pics of the at Flickr

Blender 2.46 RC5 is available now!
Blender 2.46 final will available on May 17 or 18.
The Big Buck Bunny DVD will ship on May 20
Internet release of the Big Buck Bunny movie will be on 30 or 31 May.

Wine 1.0 RC1 is now available for download. After 15 years of development it is planed to publish Wine on the 6th of June as final. Help the Wine project finding bugs and getting 1.0 stable.
Here is a short howto:

* Make sure Wine 1.0 RC1 and your favorite Windows app are installed
* Open a terminal and start your application with

env WINEPREFIX="~/.wine" wine "C:\Path\To\Your\app.exe"

* Check the output in the terminal and copy it per action via Ctrl+C into a text editor
(an example http://www.neeneenee.de/wine_photoline1451.txt)
* Go to the Wine bugtracker create a account or login
* First make sure the bug isn't submited yet
* If the bug exist create a comment and append a link to your textfile of the output

If you do not have any Wine experience check out my post "Getting your Windows app running on Linux in a easy way". You can tweak the Wine GUI too to give it a more Ubuntu styled look.

After Firefox has a lot of extensions for web development like ySlow, Web Developer, Firebug and the Internet Explorer has IEpro, Developer Toolbar and the Web Accessibility Toolbar now Opera brings Dragonfly to the front. An addon for web developers using the Opera browser. Since a while a Opera Web Developer toolbar made by the community members is available too, of course Dragonfly will add more features.

A new monthly release of the powerful, cross platform font editor FontForge. Again a lot of bugfixes and smaller improvements . Read the change log for details.
What I'm missing are news about the progress of the GTK port Hopefully this port didn't died.
A Deb packages of Fontforge for Ubuntu can be grabed here.

JiriH has created a very cool squash and stretch ball rig demonstrating the animation features of Blender. The rig only works with Blender 2.46 RC and above. More details and Downloads at Blenderartists.org.

Light Crafts has released Lightzone 3.5, a professional photo editor supporting 16bit image depth editing for RAW and HDR images, for Linux. You can download a trial too.

During my own update session and the talk about WINE at the Hardy release party Berlin i forget that besides the normal Ubuntu distribution Ubuntu Studio 8.04 is available too.
Ubuntu Studio is a special edition packed with a lot off tools for creatives focused on Graphics, Sound and Video. It ships with a special dark theme too and supports realtime audio by the kernel. You can update your normal Ubuntu installation to Ubuntu Studio by installing the "ubuntu-studio-*" packages.
Thanx to Dan for reminding me