Linux for Designers

For my next talks on IICO and may on TYPO3 Camp Berlin i bought a nice Phillips SNP 3000 presentation stick. It is made for OS X and Windows and so i get sure it will run on Ubuntu Linux too. The USB hardware was identified (use dmesg on shell) but it didn't work at all

After some tries on a Mac i figured out that it runs their only when using teh USA keyboard option. So i added an additional "USA" keyboard layout to my Ubuntu Lucid (System > Preferences > Keyboard). Now anything works fine in Evince (PDF) and OpenOffice Impress and.

While the presenter stick works like a simple keyboard device it is software independent and can be used on any software.

So many people missed new stuff here, so i decided to restart blogging again about web development, graphics, handy tools, design and 3D.

So may you yourself how my desktop looks like, here is a screeny of it:

I'm using Ubuntu Lucid with hidden top panel and Gnome Do (i really love the combination as launcher and dock). I created my own theme based on the Finery theme and a much extended version of the Eikon icons.

Since my post "Pixel 1.0 final next year" and "Pixel 1.0: Release soon or Vaporware again?" a lot of time goes by without a final release of the image editor Pixel. Now Pawel Kanzelsberger wrote "...Pixel Studio Pro is still not ready for market release (and we’re working hard to prepare it for the market)".
Besides that he released a maintenance release of Beta 0.8 that includes a Linux version too.

This year seems to be a year of operating systems. There was Ubuntu Jaunty, Moblin 2, the announcement of Chrome OS, Snow Leopard from Apple, WebOS for the Palm Pre and Windows 7.
Besides the release of Jaunty all these releases has no real impact to me but today i switched to Ubuntu Karmic Koala which is another fine Ubuntu release - and that rocks me

Just a month after the first Blender 2.49 update a secound update is available. Blender 2.49b brings quite a lot of fixes to the open source 3d suite. All improvements listed at the release log page.
Deb packages for Ubuntu are available at GetDeb.net.

This year Gran Canaria hosted both the Akademy and GUADEC conferences. The most important hackers from KDE and GNOME were for the first time at the same place.
Now the videos of a large amount of talks are available. My favorite one is Matthew Paul Thomas about Common interface bloopers - really true, very funny

Pavel Kanzelsberger, the developer of the image editor Pixel, wrote at his blog again that the release of the Pixel 1.0 comes closer. He presented a distributor for it too. This isn't the first message about a final release and after so much announcements it isn't save if this will really happend.

After the last security updates 8.1.3 and 8.1.4 now the new Adobe Reader 9.1 is available for Linux too. Like ever it isn't the fast PDF viewer for daily usage (like Envince) but it is the best PDF viewer for prepress.

[/img]Last year at the Ubucon'08 i'm getting involved designing a new flyer for Ubuntu Germany. After Julius Bloch poked us again and again, end of last year Thomas Keup and me was thinking about the message. Based on the workshop of the Ubucon'08 and our brainstorming Thomas created a really cool text for it. And so it was now on me creating a really cool design that fits to this superb text.

...and i did well »

All work is based on Inkscape, Gimp, Seperate+, Dejavu Sans & Ubuntu font, Moonshiner and CMYK Tiff 2 PDF for Gimp.

Thanks to all the people give us feedback and hunting for typo bugs.

UPDATE:
Here is the web optimized PDF of it.

I wrote some posts about simple color calibration, of course there are color management systems available for Linux too. One of them is the open source color management system Argyll CMS. dispcalGUI is a GUI frontend for several utilities (specifically dispcal, dispread, colprof and dispwin) of it. Using all together it allows you to calibrate and profile your display using a measurement device (of course Argyll CMS did a lot more).