Open Thread - 080719
Let’s try this - open for any comment, question and so on. Basic rules of human interaction apply.
Oh, an addition: I’ll steal the interesting parts…. 
Tags: Open Thread
Let’s try this - open for any comment, question and so on. Basic rules of human interaction apply.
Oh, an addition: I’ll steal the interesting parts….
Tags: Open Thread
July 19th, 2008 at 3:03 am
Rolf. this is *your* forum. I don’t think you need a user forum. You already provide room for comments/feedback here and on 23.
There are plenty of other GIMP websites that already have forums. As you pointed out, you would require a moderator etc. Personally, I *really* look forward to each episode of meetthegimp. I find your delivery and quirkiness very enjoyable. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, I think that *YOU* make the site what it is more than the subject matter (although I like that also). There are lots of websites out there and your’s fills a certain niche that obviously people appreciate.
July 19th, 2008 at 5:11 am
I just loaded ubuntu on my laptop. I would like to install the unstable gimp 2.5.2. just how would I go about this? Most of the stuff I just use synaptic package manager…. or if I have directions for using the terminal…
July 19th, 2008 at 6:23 am
Rolf: Yay!
jeff: I was able to compile and install Gimp 2.5.2 (alongside the normal Ubuntu Hardy Gimp 2.4.5, so I have both at once) by following the instructions here: http://www.gimpusers.com/news/2008-04-11/quick-notes-for-compiling-gimp-2.5.0-with-ubuntu-7.10.html
However I did the following differently:
1) I did not find it necessary to compile GLib or GTK+ as the ones already in Ubuntu Hardy were fine. So I only compiled babl, gegl, and gimp.
2) In step #5 the only export that you need for compiling is this one:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib/pkgconfig
Both the gegl and gimp configure steps will demand that you do that export first, or it will complain that you do not have babl. Make sure that you actually do have the babl you just created installed first, or else it will be correct when it tells you that you don’t have it
Then to run the program I made a shell script like this (per the advice on the Gimp website here: http://gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.5.html )
#!/bin/sh
PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/bin:$PATH
export PATH
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
/opt/gimp-2.5/bin/gimp-2.5 “$@”
Whatever name you give to that shell script file is the one you use to start Gimp 2.5. Remember to do:
chmod +x [whatever-you-called-it]
so you can execute it.
3) I prefer to use deb packaging where possible and so I use the program “checkinstall” rather than doing the “sudo make install” step for each of the 3 compiles. Checkinstall is a little buggy at times so you may not want to use it, but if you do here is some advice:
3a) Checkinstall will fail until you create some directories ahead of time (there may be some I missed, but checkinstall will let you know):
sudo mkdir /opt/gimp-2.5/share/locale
sudo mkdir /opt/gimp-2.5/share/icons
sudo mkdir /opt/gimp-2.5/share/icons/hicolor
sudo mkdir /opt/gimp-2.5/share/gimp/2.0/fonts
3b) Checkinstall will list 10 options, and option line #2 is the name of the package itself, which will be by default “gimp”. Since you already have “gimp” installed as Gimp 2.4.5 you will have to change the package name to avoid a conflict, to something like “gimp-2.5″ or similar, just so it’s different.
I wish I could say all this is “easy”, but perhaps not. If it seems confusing, then just stick with the original instructions and not mine.
Bill
July 19th, 2008 at 6:29 am
Forgot something:
4) Start checkinstall like this:
sudo checkinstall –install=no
Then when it finishes you will get a deb, which you can install like this (babl package shown, similar for the others):
sudo dpkg -i babl_0.0.22-1_i386.deb
and of course the advantage is that this will show up in Synaptic if you later decide you want to get rid of it (or upgrade it).
July 19th, 2008 at 6:36 am
I hope this is the last correction…
Errrr, there are two dashes in front of the install=no above, but I think the blog might have changed that to a single “endash” character.
July 19th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
2.5.2 stuff pulled into a new posting. Please discuss there.
This seems to be a good way to fill the blog….
July 19th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
First, I think Rolf needs an increase in pay and a promotion
Second..something that I have been wondering about..it applies to GIMP..it applies to almost all things given freely for the benefit of people.
I live in a suburb of Chicago..and am the only one around who participates in Creative Commons/ccMixter, etc. ( I am a musician/composer/producer/shoe shine boy..). A guy who lives across the street from me teaches “art” at the local Middleschool, for those in not the land of Bush (soon to be over, thank Ja) that is roughly young teenage kids. Even though this is a fairly prosperous place (especially compared to the places that don’t CONSUME their way to an early grave..) the school district wouldn’t spend the $$ for photoshop licenses..so they have to use some ersatz program that’s cheaper.but in no way as good as the mighty GIMP.
When I mentioned this to my neighbor, I got an interesting reaction; 1st, he had never heard of it..I explained (as well as a musician can ;( what GIMP is..then I got “so it’s a crack?”..No..it’s NOT a crack, it’s..then I explained the license..then I got, “but how can it be any good if it’s ..free?”
This is what I would like to throw out on Rolf’s blog..and please email me jpazdan at gmail dot com as I don’t want to tie things up here..but..
I have noticed this reaction about a lot of free things, especially here in the land of Hummers and obesity..’it can’t be real uhhhh quality..if it’s free”.
Anyone else have the same reaction? It’s absurd to me that people think like this, especially, as we know, there’s a “sucker born every minute”..and the current president is the best example I can think of.
John
July 19th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Everything works until I try to configure the GIMP 2.5.2 sources, It just thows me this error: configure: error: Test for GEGL failed. Please get it from http://gegl.org/. Anyone know how to fix this?
July 19th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Sorry, wrong thread.
July 19th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
At our local school system there were some of the faculty that tried to get OpenOffice on the school’s computers and voted it down (for reasons I can’t remember), but the real irony is that a lot of the teachers know that every kid can put this on their computer at home for free, so when they give homework that requires word processing or presentations, they tell them to use/get OpenOffice.
I think the bottom line is often money on both sides of the coin… they won’t risk their job (think who should we blame?) to recommend OpenOffice inside the organization, and they won’t risk their job (think angry parents who have to pay $) to recommend anything but OpenOffice outside the organization.
July 19th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Rob: You need to install the babl and gegl packages that you built before you can then build gimp. Also you must type the following into the terminal window (before you do the configure for gimp):
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib/pkgconfig
What is happening is that the gimp configure runs pkgconfig and it goes looking for the babl and gegl header files (the ones that end in “.h” ). If it can’t find them it *assumes* that you don’t have it installed. You may or may not actually have them installed, but the export shows it where to look.
July 19th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Thank you billstei, its working now
July 19th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Rob: Yay!
billstei: Hey you posted that to the wrong thread.
July 19th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Free = can’t be good. Great topic, John.
BTW, if you want to check - click on John’s music in the sidebar on tha main page.
The people at the Slobodni Festival last weekend complained about the same view from a lot of businesspeople they had contacted.
In school we have several problems with Free Software:
- Teachers are older than else were. With my 50 years I sit somewhere in the middle of the age distribution. These age class has mostly a problem with computers - I am a geek and an exception. They are glad when they can run the same software on the school computer as on their private computer. Off the shelf was MS-Windows…..
- A lot of the programs made for the textbooks are Windows only
- The teacher training courses are financed and organised not by the state but by a industry foundation. Pure charity. Big part in there Intel and MS,
- There is not much time for teachers to administrate the PCs and Network. Our PC guy gets 1.5 hours a week for about 30 PCs on a network. And these are not operated by skilled bureau workers but by kids. Guess how much time he has for putting something new on the machines. With Windows he can sometimes call in the support.
But in the general society and among the kids the wind is changing. Firefox did a lot for that.
July 20th, 2008 at 2:39 am
Since Rolf said that he will steal the most interesting parts of the open thread, here is something…
One of the more useful changes that can be found in Gimp 2.5.2 is the ability to move the edge of a zoomed image away from the edge of the window. This is not immediately obvious, because when you move the scroll bars they still stop at the end of the scroll bar area and the image still stops at the edge of the window where it used to stop. But now either 1) use the scroll bar arrows (which greyed out in 2.4), or 2) hold down middle mouse button and drag,… and the edge of the image can be moved over. This allows tools that would normally stop working at the edge to be used beyond that edge. So, for example, if I had a brush that was being used to paint near the edge of the image, the tool stops (disappears) as the middle of the brush crosses over the edge of the image… and it would be impossible to use, say, the right half of the brush on the left edge of the image. But now I can pull the image away from the edge and the tool continues to work, even beyond the edge of the image.
July 20th, 2008 at 5:59 am
I agree, I think Rolf needs an increase in pay and a promotion
This may be a faq, but I’ve only been watching MTGimp using Miro since #49, and I don’t see it covered in the recent stuff. It may be in the older videos.
I have a group photo that I want to turn into a single portrait. I’ve figured out how to do the basic elimination of others using the tips Rolf has shown.
But the person is a lady with shoulder length hair, and I need to do something to remove other people, background clutter, etc. while keeping the hair looking real.
This is really a more general question: when you have a photo with what the typefont folks call anti-aliasing, when you work with it, the border pixels are a mixed color, part foreground and part color merged with the background.
So how do I clean up stuff and make the edited image have the proper anti-aliasing for the new background?
Thanks
Pat
July 20th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Pat : After making a background layer that contrasts her hair,
Try adding an alpha channel to the layer you’re working on and then using ‘layer->transparency->color to alpha’ if the background color is fairly uniform. If that looks fairly good, try adjusting the alpha curves (select ‘Alpha’ component in the curves tool)
Otherwise, I would use the path tool to carefully select the background near the hair and Edit->Clear that (again, only once the layer has an alpha channel), then lock the layer alpha and use the paintbrush with a tiny brush to adjust the color of the semitransparent areas so they blend better.
For example, in the best case, your lady has black or dark brown hair, and you could probably just paint any noisy-looking pixels with black to achieve a good result.
July 20th, 2008 at 11:45 am
@billstei: Please fire up recordmydesktop and make a video of that and the other cool stuff like the selection tool!
Sound is not important, I can talk over it if needed.
July 20th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Rolf: Sorry about the delayed response, there is a 7 hour time zone difference. I consider myself uniquely unqualified to do this, so… sure!
July 20th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Rolf: Well you anticipated my problem… I cannot get the sound to record reliably — it breaks up and/or the playback of the ogg video slowly goes out of sync with the audio. Not sure where all the problems lie…
What software are you using to do the Meet The Gimp videos ?
July 20th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Just the problems I had with RecordMyDesktop.
I hoped they had fixed that.
I use Demorecorder http://demorecorder.com
You can download the demo version, record, zip the directory and send me that. It puts nasty watermarks into the output if you don’t have a license. But if I get the directory, I can convert it here.
My commandline is:
demorec –width 800 –height 600 –x 200 –y 200 –hifi –opengl-hw –no-shape –out DirName
Otherwise, send me what you have made, I’ll make a voice over.
“uniquely unqualified”, welcome in the club!
July 21st, 2008 at 1:35 am
Good evening everyone!
To make the open thread a little more confusing, here’s something I just found out that might be interesting (I still use GIMP 2.4):
When you use the curves tool and you want to preserve the original image, we all know that you duplicate the layer and then use the curves tool on that duplicate.
Now try this: Don’t bother duplicating the layer. Just select your curve, and then, instead of clicking OK, click on the “duplicate layer” button in the layers dialog.
The original image will be preserved and the curve will be applied in a new layer, so you don’t need to copy the layer before using the curves tool…
This saves you exactly one click if you know what you are doing. But if you have already started to play with the curves and then remember you want to make a copy it comes in handy, because if you closed the curves tool to copy the layer, your curve would be lost.
If you already knew this, please ignore this comment
July 21st, 2008 at 3:07 am
eBrnd: good tip
Rolf: Now that we know your screen capturing secret, what about video editing? Kdenlive maybe, or ? It occurs to me that the issues of recordmydesktop sound could be worked around simply by using it for video only while simultaneously recording audio into, say, Audacity and then syncing the clips in Kdenlive or similar. Inconvenient, but better than the miserable results that I got.
July 21st, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I would love to use kdenlive, but it is stuck to TV screen sizes. And 640×480 is the defacto standard of video podcasts (iPod…
), but that is not in the list. I use cinelerra - a bit of overkill. BTW, no secrets, it’s on the “About me” page on the top of the sidebar.
July 21st, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Well cinelerra crashes after a minute or two, and kdenlive crashes immediately, so I’m not going anywhere anytime soon with video editing. But the rumor is that a final 0.6 kdenlive is coming soon — maybe things will improve.
July 21st, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Cinelerra doesn’t crash if you save often. I always press “s” a lot - when I forget about it, it crashes.