Going Open Source - Part 2

It's now been 3 weeks since my laptop munched it's hard disk and I took the (long overdue) opportunity to try and take all my studio functions onto an open source platform.

The install went well, most things worked with little or no tinkering.

Now we come to software. There is a set of software applications that I need to find open source alternatives to, because if I don't then I can't work.

My list of essentials is:

• Photoshop, illustrator, Indesign, Flash, Director and Dreamweaver, all by Adobe
• Blender, Open Office, Flock, Skype, Thunderbird and Second Life
• Some decent fonts

First let me say that the latter all come with Linux versions, Blender and Open Office are either pre-installed with my chosen distribution (Ubuntu Studio) or are available via the inbuilt application installer service. Easy. Worked first time. Apart from one annoying thing about blender in that it doesn't recognise my ALT key, so some of the key combinations don't work properly.

Originally I was planning to find a solution for the Blender / ALT key problem and post that in part 3, but thanks to Dan Kegel at http://www.winehq.org I now have an answer to this and a mostly working copy of Photoshop.

For the ALT key problem: Go to System >> Preferences >> Windows, and under Movement Key, pick "Super (Windows Key)" instead of "Alt". Worked perfectly for me.

Flock and the Second Life client are both worth noting in that whilst they were both very easy to download and install, the hardest part (ironically) is the process for making a desktop icon for each application. This involves writing a short text file in the following format:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Second Life
Comment=Second Life Linux Client
Exec="/home/alan/secondlife/secondlife"
Icon=/home/alan/secondlife/res-sdl/ll_icon.BMP
Path=$HOME/secondlife
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
Categories=Network;Application;
GenericName[en_US]=Second Life

This example is taken from my Second Life desktop icon, but the format is the same for any. The file itself needs to be saved in the root of your home area and needs to be named appname.desktop where appname is replaced by the name of your chosen application. I'd be very interested to hear if someone knows of an easier / point and click way of doing this?

Finding replacements for the assortment of Adobe software that I use has been a trickier task, compounded by the fact that some of the technologies are proprietry and won't be available from anyone else. My experience of finding replacements is something like this:

Photoshop: this is the hardest one of the bunch and also the tool that I use the most. There are a number of packages out there that give up to about 70% of the features available from Photoshop. Gimp and Xara Extreme are both high on my list, and Paint.NET looks to be very promising if I can get it to work (no success yet).

Again I need to credit Dan Kegel at http://www.winehq.org for pointing me to their Wiki page on running Adobe Photoshop under Wine. Which after a complete removal and reinstall of Wine, worked perfectly apart from two things. First, I'm installing from Creative Suite which includes all the Adobe software and comes on 5 CDs. Problem is that the installer fails to recognise when you change from disk 1 to the next disk. Thankfully, Photoshop is on disk 1. The second problem is that the Activation and the Updater both fail. The activator throws an error exclaiming “not enough disk space available to run this program” and promptly closes, but leaves Photoshop running, and the updater just sits there and does nothing. Neither are exactly catastrophic problems – the software works just fine.

I'm still going to try and get Paint.NET working though. If there is an option to use native Linux, opensource alternatives then that's my preferred solution.

Illustrator: Inkscape pretty much has this one covered. It's fairly easy to use and is similar enough that finding the equivalent tools in the software is not too much of a problem. This piece of software came as part of the Ubuntu Studio basic installation.

Indesign: Scribus is on first glance (and I haven't made much use of it yet - just a simple A5 flyer layout) a good replacement for indesign. Again, this application came as part of the Ubuntu Studio basic installation.

Flash: To be honest, Flash is what it is and I wouldn't attempt to find an alternative. Flash 8 installs fine under Wine. Works exactly as you would expect. Installing Wine is very easy, as it can be found in the application installer service.

Director: I use director for a lot of CD-ROM based materials and a fair amount of legacy stuff. The installer worked fine, but I haven't yet managed to get the application to start. I'll update on my progress in Part 3.

Dreamweaver: There is an alternative – Quanta Plus. It's available via the application installer service. This one isn't as good a fit as the other alternatives. Whilst it has a good functionality and includes templates, site management and all the usual stuff, inluding an in-window preview render of the page, that preview is not editable. Personally speaking, I use dreamweaver because of the ability to chop between editing direct into the rendered representation of the page and the underlying code at will. This is why Quanta Plus doesn't work for me. Not because it's a bad piece of software, but because it isn't a fit for the way I want to work. This is also compounded by the fact that Dreamweaver 8 installs and works perfectly under Wine. So for web page work, I know which one I'm choosing.

BUT (and this goes for any of these applications) if anyone has a recommendation for any alternative applications, or ways to make things work then please post them here and I'll follow up on them in Part 3.

And I suppose it's worth making a point about that too: there will be a part 3. I've been using Ubuntu Studio for 3 weeks now. It's not perfect. I still spend time sorting things out. Making odd things work that really, just ought to work. I have yet to finish with printers, fonts, laptop mode and drivers for things like my MP3 player and Wacom tablet. But despite this, there is a very solid alternative to anything by Microsoft and I have no desire to go back.

Pale