I've been using Linux for a few months now and I have come to really enjoy it. I have Suse 9.2 Pro on my laptop and I have to say that its great not having to worry about getting a virus or crashing all the time. My interest has gotten me to tell others about Linux. At my job, we have a mixture of Windows and Macs. We do publishing and have a lot of artwork and visual stuff that we do. One of the core problems that I've been trying to help solve is this issue of non conforming network. What I mean by this is that I haven't been able to successfully setup a network that works pretty much seamless with a Linux file server and Windows/Macs as clients.

So one of the things that occured to me is that it might be a good idea to change the whole office to use Linux. It costs the company virtually nothing and well, with my experience it appears that Linux's stability is exactly the type of thing the office network needs.

My question to everyone is, are there any graphic designers, webdesigners, or people that work in print publishing that work with Linux? The reason why I'm asking is because in these fields of work, there a bunch of programs that we utilize to produce product such as Quark, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Illustrator, MS Word, MS Excel, FileMaker... etc. I'm curious as to whether or not people have successfully installed these programs or similar programs on the Linux boxes.

I have used Crossover Office which is similar to Wine. Using Crossover I managed to get Photoshop 7, Macromedia MX, and MS Office XP to install just fine. I believe the reason why is because these products are listed under Crossover's supported software. With programs such as Quark and FileMaker, they are not supported but can they still be installed and used properly?

My attempt to install software unsupported by Crossover ended up in failure. Crossover supports Flash MX and Dreamerweaver MX which intalled just fine on my Linux machine. When I went and installed Fireworks MX, the installation itself went fine but when I tried to launch the program I got an error. So based on this experience, I think that unsupported software for Crossover will be tough to be installed.

I'm asking for any help and advice from those of you who have a similar background and have somewhat succeeded in setting up Linux. My goal is to get the entire office to use Linux.

BTW, thanks for reading this long post

I'm not a publisher or a graphics designer, but I do have an interest in writing and (to a lesser extent) illustration.

Personally, I prefer to use free software than messing around with propriatory solutions on potentially buggy emulators. A few things to look at are:

GIMP (www.gimp.org) - an excellent graphics tool, especially with the new version 2.2 which offers previews of filter effects. It supports just about every feature you could want, including layers, filters, scriptability, good handling of large files, and so on.

Scribus (http://www.scribus.org.uk/) - a document layout tool. Great for small projects, but I've heard that it doesn't scale up well.

OpenOffice.org (www.openoffice.org) - standard office software. Tends to have slightly different features to MS Office, but it's certainly no less featured.

LaTeX (http://www.latex-project.org/) - LaTeX is an extremely high quality typesetting tool, mainly used to setting scientific documents (but, of course, can be used for almost anything). It's not a WYSIWYG tool (for that, you need to add Lyx from http://www.lyx.org/) and not something you can expect to just sit down and use, but the results that you get for a little effort are certainly far better than any WYSIWYG tool I've ever seen.

I don't know what this program is. Thanks for letting me know about the other stuff though. I've tried Gimp and will practice with it more so I can hopefully just use this in place of Photoshop. I know that its going to take time but eventually the open source software will match or even surpass the other programs.

just to update people it is scribus.net now nor .org you will just be looking at a wight screen for ever till you google scribus like i idid

secur*;
If you want to advertise here, see the links at the bottom of the page.

I am an user of Linux Mint/Ubuntu Distros. There are some free software for graphic design and desktop publisihng:
1. Gimp
2. Pinta - image manipulation it is like GIMP
3. Krita - for drawing
4. Skencil
5. Sk1 - similar to Corel Draw, it is for prepress and plotter settings, also similar to CorelDraw.
6. Libre Office Draw.
7. Scribus - desktop publishing.

I hope you are well pleased.

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Somewhat prehistoric, no? Anyway...

My initial reaction is to advise you not to do it.

If you have a professional designer who spends 50++% of their time using, say, Photoshop, turning up one day and announcing that henceforth that their program of choice will be the Gimp is going to be about as popular as the Black Death. Using Photoshop under some emulator-like arrangement is unlikely to deliver the absolute stability that a native Linux program would, so I don't see either way as being workable.

It would be a different matter if they were casual users.

If you mean something other than a heterogeneous network, please explain more. And if you are going down this route because you couldn't get a heterogeneous network to work, maybe that needs more attention.

@vandien76og
The last I heard, Gimp doesn't support ICC, and doesn't have the same resolution as Photoshop. Probably not a problem for casual usage, deadly for professionals (or, at least, that's what they'll say). Krita, oddly, doesn't have those limitations, but:

Someone trained and with years of experience of Photoshop will want something that works exactly like Photoshop. Neither Gimp or Krita is that program. Try Gimpshop, which is closer, but you'll still need to worry about filters, particularly if they have authored their own or have picked them up from the 'net.

Hadn't heard of Pinta and will look into that. Darktable looks good, but I can't say anything else about it, yet.

(Edit: this is from the package description, for 0.3: Pinta is a drawing/editing program modeled after Paint.NET. It's goal is to provide a simplified alternative to GIMP for casual users. It is currently early in development: I remember now that I had heard of Pinta and dismissed it as too simplified and too early in development, but, maybe I was wrong, or maybe it has changed enough in the interim. An unfinished clone of paint didn't seem like anything that I wanted at the time.)

I haven't used Scribus for some time, but, while it seemed to me to be quite capable of producing newsletters and the like, I think it would be a brave person who would move a critical part of their workflow over to it (I remember when it crashed every few minutes, which really was irritating, but that was a while ago - I am sure that it has massively improved since then, but I don't know if it has improved enough either to bet the company on or to bet your career on, without further work).

@rjlee
I'm sorry, but OpenOffice is less featured than MS Office. It isn't missing any of the basic functionality, but you will run into trouble if:

• you run outside of the 80:20 rule. that is 80% of the time, you only use 20% of the features. An efficient accounting dept will certainly do that with the spreadsheet and if you want the integration that MS offers with the other MS programs (eg, Project, Outlook), you'll be stuck there too
• Last time I looked, there was no documentation on the accuracy of, eg, the more complex math functions. I was told on the OO forum that this was a stupid thing to ask for, as OO wasn't that kind of program. This is bizarre, and I assume doesn't represent the official position of OO, but would be deadly for really heavy duty usage.
• (OO 'features' are probably exceeded by Go-OO, being more friendly towards outside contributions than the basic OO program; Go-OO is, in effect, being replaced by LibreOffice {and, IBM is contributing its 'Symphony' office suite to the OO project, as we speak}
• If you have a suite of macros for MS Office, they will break. You'll have to start again, although not from ground zero.

(Of course, I could also write even worse things about MS Office, if I chose. but you have got used to, or learnt to work around, those very bad things, and, in spite of the fact that I'd be happy to say that from a standing start, and for average usage, you could consider them to be comparable, when we are considering a migration from one suite to another, the one that you are already with will always have some advantages when it comes to (in)compatibility.)

Maelstrom209,
such a big change will no doubt cause a host of problems but thought I might mention Kompozer as an alternative to Dreamweaver (best run in KDE desktop) and the fact that Gimp has improved its picture quality in recent years.

Fred.

You realize that this thread is from 2004?