Linux for Designers

Today the KOffice project released the 7th alpha of KOffice 2 including the image editor Krita 2 and the vector drawing app Karbon14 2. In this alpha Krita brings a new plugin architecture. Of course the alpha 7 includes a lot of bugfixes too.

SANE, the API that provides standardized access to a scanner under linux (flatbed-/ hand-held-scanner, video-/ still-cameras etc.), is updated to 1.0.19:
* Support for new scanners (Epson, HP, Ricoh)
* An updated backend for various scanners
* Scanimage detects more chipsets
* Updated translations.
* Documentation updates.
* Bugfixes

A new 1.2 version of SANE is planed too, so SANE 2 will be in far feature. There is an interesting blog post of Gnome Scan, about that plan. Gnome Scan is like XSane or Kooka a frontend to SANE.

Sowm weeks ago Gnome Speciman was released as version 0.4.

FontyPython another font manager for the Gnome desktop is updated again to version 0.3.3, which is a bugfix release.



And the cool Qt based font manager Fontmatrix is available as beta 0.3. Donwload and changes can be found at the release notes.

Yesterday i was on the Ubuntu usergroup meeting of ubuntuusers here in Berlin. As i saw anybody uses different kind of desktop systems: KDE, Wine, wxWidgets and of course Gnome.
So how to get all these look like as one desktop?
Ok, the wxWidgets look by default like your theme is setted up, so no need of customizing.


To setup your KDE/Qt inside Gnome:

• you need to run "qtconfig-qt3" or ""qtconfig-qt4" at the commandline to setup any kind of QT app like Skype etc.; there you can setup the color for QT apps WYSIWYG
  
• run "kcontrol" at the commandline to setup any kind KDE app, got to "Appereance" and there setup "Style" (use "Plastic"), "Colors", "Fonts" and "Icons" (install Tango and Tangerine icons for KDE); at KDE-look.org you will find different Ubuntu color themes too
  
• a QT3 Human color theme (copy it into ".qt3" in your home directory)
  

Setup Wine:

• if you using Wine at the first time you will be shocked of these very ugly Win95 colors; but you can change this by runing "winecfg" at the commandline; click on the tab "Desktop integration" in the dropdown "Element" you can setup the colors for the GUI elements.
  
• At the moment Wine gets very slow using themes like Clearlooks or Human
  
• a Human color theme registry file for import
  

In my post "Tweaking WINE" you will find the color values of the default Ubuntu Human color theme.

I found this nice article aboout possibilities for color calibration of monitors at Linux.com:
http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/07/2244242

A lot of calibration chart can be found at Normen Koren's site

I'm a little bit disappointed that such a tool like KGamma for the Gnome desktop is missing.