Linux for Designers

I updated my Linux-Mac-Windows CSS font matching list to support Redhat's Liberation fonts. Now i have to add this to CSSdev for Gimp too.

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After we getting Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Safari 3.1.x and in far future we will get Internet Explorer 8 a lot of tests poped up. So check out all the tests about Acid3, JavaScript performance and various speed tests:
http://www.zimbrablog.com/blog/archives/2008/06/and-the-winner-is.html
http://www.zdnet.de/news/software/0,39023144,39192354,00.htm
http://lifehacker.com/396048/speed-testing-the-latest-web-browsers
http://webstandard.kulando.de/post/2008/06/23/ladezeiten-von-firefox-3-ie7-safari-3.1.2-und-opera-9.5-im-test
http://webstandard.kulando.de/post/2008/06/25/firefox-3-safari-3.1.2-opera-9.5-und-co.-im-acid3-test

In the evening of the 14th Juli i have a talk about open source graphic software and Ubuntu. The workshop is about web design, print, vector graphics, imageing & photos and 3D. It is organized by Ubuntu Berlin with support of the c-base. If you like we can meet us there!
Update: Here is the official appointment

After 15 years of development and 5 release candidates Wine is published today as 1.0. In the release candidate phase so many bugs were fixed and Wine runs really smooth now my favorite Windows apps. If you ever had problems with older versions of Wine you should give it a try again
Read my post about the smoothest way getting you Windows app running too.

Besides ySlow and Firebug another good addon for web development in Firefox ist Web Developer. Version 1.1.6 is now working with Firefox 3. A german version is available at erweiterungen.de other languages are available on the website of Web Developer.
Happy coding!

Salasaga (formally known as the Flame Project) an integrated development environment for producing eLearning content is now released as 0.8 Alpha 3. Since 0.8 Alpha 2 there are several bugs fixed, take a look at the release log.
An example of what can be done with Salasaga is available online. A Deb package is available for Ubuntu too.

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

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.

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

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.