[Gllug] Gimp 2.0 on Mdk 9.1 ??

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 23:07, Andrew Scott wrote:

<snip>

First bit already answered by others...

> b. A novice PC desktop users in my family has just acquired a bleeding
> edge cheapo PC World own brand 3.2 GHz 512MB 120 GB HDD beast complete
> with digital camera card reader, HP LaserJet 1015 with USB connector
> cable, XP Home preinstalled, and Adobe Photoshop together with some
> Broderbund DTP app or other, plus of course the requisite Norton
> Antivirus. He tells me he wants to hook it up to broadband. *Shudder*.
> Well of course I'm now on a mercy mission to help him cotton on to what
> he might be letting himself in for. I'll be over there tomorrow
> afternoon armed with a copy of Knoppix 3.3 that was all I could obtain
> at short notice. The PC was still in bits last time I spoke, so there is
> still time. I've come to the conclusion that he's be far better off with
> a nice boxed copy of Suse 9.1 Personal edition that would set him back
> ooohhh £25 or so.

Sounds like an improvement over XP, anyway :-)

>  He will have demanding DTP and photo processing
> requirements. 
> The very nice Ximian build OO.o v1.1.1 should deal with
> the DTP,

Scribus is supposed to be nice, though I've never tried it.
http://www.scribus.net/

>  and GIMP v2.0 with the photo stuff.

You want to check *very carefully*, exactly what these requirements are.
If he's working with RAW files from mid to high-end digital cameras,
Adobe Photoshop CS provides a RAW conversion plugin, which is really
quite nice. There is nothing comparable (yes, there's dcraw, but it's
really not comparable for ease of use by a non techie) for Linux, and if
he needs that functionality, I'd be very careful about moving him to
Linux. I use the RAW format for pretty much all of my digital photos, as
it offers significant advantages over JPEG, and my converter is a 'doze
program that I run under Wine. Forcing that on a new user might be
counter-productive though....

>  I know I shall have to
> uninstall and reinstall xine and kaffeine [never used them personally,
> but he will probably want to play DVDs ...]. Questions:
> - Is this a good choice?

Xine plays DVD's just fine.

> - I know nothing of card readers and Linux. Breeze or minefield, and
> where might I go for information?

Card readers are basically simple. Make sure your kernel has USB, USB
mass storage, and SCSI support, either statically, or as modules, and
you should just be able to mount the card like a disk. You can also set
up hotplug and gtkam or something, which is a very slick bit of software
- I've made Windows users envious with it in the past.

Downside is that on a system with multiple card readers, or other stuff
which appears as SCSI disks, if you plug ad unplug them, they have the
annoying habit of "device hopping", so you can't just stick in an fstab
entry for your card reader. I have a SCSI system, with two card readers
and an external firewire drive. Whenver I plug a card in it's a guessing
game as to whether it'll be sde, sdf, sdg, or sdh today.... The fix for
this is to use udev, but I've not tried it yet, though it's on my list.

> - The HP LJ 1015 *should*, I have read, work just fine, but needs a
> modern pixbuf driver. Is this something provided by default by e.g. CUPS
> or do I have to search and install?

Have a look at the entry at linuxprinting:-

http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-LaserJet_1015

You just need to download the ppd, and install it into CUPS with that.
However, as the printer isn't a native PostScript model, you'll also
need to have foomatic-rip installed, and the HPIJS drivers, so that cups
can convert the PostScript that your system feeds the printer to PCL
that the printer will actually understand.

> Thanks, I appreciate time taken to read digest and reply. Looking
> forward to some answers!

Good luck, and have fun...

Mike.

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