Linux for Designers

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

Qtpfsgui, a graphical user interface that enables users to work with HDR images, is updated to version 1.9.2. This Version tries to fix several filename encoding bugs.

There are a lot of sites presenting you funny or horrible pictures - no deal. But to find something interesting and inspiring is quite hard. Two days ago i sit together with Nic in front of the screen and discovering two hours long FFFFOUND! - deal!

Those who looking for a solution creating video tutorials or screencasts should try out Salasaga (formaly known as Flame Project). A Deb package for Ubuntu Linux is available too.
Or download the binaries of Wink 1.5 for Linux. Both solution will creating suberp Flash videos and allowing more then a simple capturing like xvidcap does.
UPDATE: Check out recordMyDesktop too.

F-Spot, a full-featured personal photo management application with a modern interface, is official released as 0.4.3. It shipped with many bugfixes and some feature enhancements:
* new print dialog with preview, new print options
* new filmstrip widget in Edit mode
* allow custom selection ratios for cropping
* sort tags by popularity (desc) in tag-typing autocompletion
* x-content/* support, integrate seemlessly with gnome 2.22
* works again on ppc architecture
* tons of bugfixes, translation updates and improvments all over the place

The final version of the photo management software Picasa 2.7 for Linux is available. Now you can import images from your disk and publish them in the web. Besides this long awaited feature Picasa 2.7 for Linux offers:
* a better and faster import of images
* added support for the cameras Canon EOS 30D and Nikon D200
* support for Adobe DNG format
* bigger previews
* better search for camera details like ISO or focal values
Video support is still missing in the Linux version. Renember Picasa is not a native Linux application, its ported to Linux using the Winelib. You can download it for various distributions including Debian/ Ubuntu.

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.

I found this blog on the web and had a lot of fun with it:
Photoshop Disasters

My favorite is this (take a look at the hands and count it )

Many people ask "What's the smoothest way running Photoshop on Linux? How you get it?" - the answer is easy: Check out the Wine Wiki: Running Adobe Photoshop on Wine

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

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.