Linux for Designers

The Smashing Magazine published a new article about retouching photos with Photoshop. I'm sure you can do that with Gimp too

When i looked around what happened in Gimp development i read that the first addition additions to Gimp 2.5.2 has been arrived. Sven Neumann posted in his blog a screeny of the Online Help feature too.

Besides the development of Gimp 2.6 a bugfix release of the Gimp 2.4 series is available. Gimp is a feature rich image editor with a functionality similar to Photoshop.
All changes of Gimp 2.4.6 are listed in the news file. Users of Ubuntu Linux can download a Deb package too.

If you are missing features in Gimp and didn't like to pay a lot for Photoshop you should definitely tryout Photoline. It's powerfull and stable as Photoshop itself, has the best PSD file support i ever saw and it is really cheap.
The only bad thing is you need Wine to get it running on Linux. At the moment i getting some problems with the icons of the toolbars and sometimes the cursor is not visible. I think this could be fixed soon when a new stable version of Wine is available.
All about Photoline 14.51 can be found in the release notes.
UPDATE: I added a bug report to the bugzilla of the Wine project.

There is a first development snapshot of Gimp 2.5 available and some screens about it. You can download this unstable version and read the complete list of changes.
besides this good news of Gimp development the Gimp User Manual is updated to version 2.4.1 and is available for download too.

The Wine development is fast these days, again a new version is available. The good news for design and 3d people are "Support for multiple OpenGL pixel formats" and "Improved support for color profiles".
If you using Ubuntu there is a repository and a .deb packages archive to get the newest version.

You can tweak the Wine GUI too to give it a more Ubuntu styled look.

Google has hired Codeweavers, which are the leaders of the Wine project and offering commercial services around it. Codeweavers should add better support for Photoshop on Linux. Since Wine 0.9.54 there are much improvements that let running Photoshop CS2 under Wine. This patches has nice side effects, so Flash 8 is working well too.
If you using Ubuntu there is a repository and a .deb packages archive to get the newest version.

You can tweak the Wine GUI too to give it a more Ubuntu styled look.

A new version of Wine is released, besides the usual fixes and D3D improvements it shipped with a better support for Photoshop CS2: "...Photoshop CS/CS2 should now work, please help us testing it...".
If you using Ubuntu there is a repository and a .deb packages archive to get the newest version.

You can tweak the Wine GUI too to give it a more Ubuntu styled look.

The new release of
XnView 1.92 is available. Improved features, more supported file formats and bugfixes, all in detail can be read here.
It is a Windows application (the Linux version is outdated and got a ugly GUI) but with some tweaks and a actual release of Wine it runs perfect on Linux too. There are some tweaks for let it running smooth:
* tell XnView in the options (F12) to use the registry for store settings (if not any settings get lost after closing XnView)
* change the ugly Win95 colors of Wine by running the Wine registry editor and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors and setup the colors you like. You can tweak the GUI to give it the look of your desktop.

Another bugfix release of the Gimp 2.4 series. Gimp is a feature rich image editor with a functionality similar to Photoshop.
All about Gimp 2.4.3 is listed in the news file.
If you are using Ubuntu Linux you can grab deb archives at getdeb.net.