| The Best Free Desktop Linux . . . and how to make it better |
(Part 5)
Graphics
I have been through many generations of digital cameras. About eight years ago, I paid $800.00 for a Casio camera that captured images at 320 x 240 resolution. Everyone I showed the camera to was impressed. Many people asked me to print out images but I told them that there simply wasn't enough resolution to get a good print. Later I bought a Sony Mavica that raised the bar to 640 x 480. I honestly believed that this was high quality and I used this camera to put photos on my website.
One of my biggest regrets is I took this camera to Paris with my wife and we captured many of our memories on 3.5-inch floppies. The idea of getting a camera that supported floppies seemed like a great idea at the time. It was the easiest way to load images into the computer.
Despite the limited resolution, it was fun being able to send e-mail with photos from France to our friends. A year later I got a new Sony Mavica with 1.2 Megapixels. I went through a succession of digital cameras and now I have a Nikon D70. The Nikon D70 is a great camera.
Using a PC, you have to load drivers and software for each camera that you own. The alternative is to get a flash card adapter. Linux has a program called Digikam that will let you transfer and capture files from just about any camera.
DigiKam with my Nikon D70
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I hooked up my D70 to see if I could get it to work with DigiKam. At first I couldn't make it work so I rebooted my system with the camera connected. DigiKam will automatically recognize many cameras or you can select your camera from a list. The Nikon D70 wasn't on the list. When I rebooted SimplyMEPIS, it recognized the D70 as a SDA drive. Under Settings --> Configure DigiKam. Under Cameras, I selected USB mass storage. I selected Camera Port Type as USB and I put my camera mount point as mnt/sda1/dcim/100___/.
I saved all my photos out of the D70 into my ~/Pictures directory. SimplyMEPIS comes with a viewer that is KDE's default viewer, KwickShow. While there is nothing wrong with KwickShow, in my opinion GQview is a better viewer. GQview is a graphics viewer similar to the commercial program ACDSee. You can easily download and install GQview using either apt-get or Synaptic.
GQView added to SimplyMEPIS
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Once you install GQview, you now have to set up SimplyMEPIS so that each time you click on a photo, it opens in GQview. The way to do this is to open up your Pictures directory. Right Click on an image file. Move your cursor down to Open With. In the text block on the top, type in cqview. You can try this out before you check the box that does this every time you click on this file format.
Using Synaptic or apt-get you can also add or update GIMP as well as XPaint. Both of these graphic editors integrate directly into GQview.
GIMP is an Open Source program that provides similar functionality to Adobe Photo Shop. A very comprehensive book on GIMP, Grokking the GIMP details the program. For a very quick primer on how to use GIMP, go here
GIMP graphics editor brings Photo Shop capabilities to SimplyMEPIS
(Click to enlarge)
OpenOffice includes its own graphics editor. You can click on the graphics image. A series of tools to lighten and adjust the image will appear. You can export the graphics image from one format to another.
If you downloaded KOffice, KPaint is included. KPaint is quite crude compared to OpenOffice Draw or GIMP.
-- Continued --
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