what programs are there for raw nef files?
 

My mother has just gone pro photographer and has splashed out on a good camera (Nikon D80) however for the raw NEF format the gimp creates little tempory tiff files instead of just opening them up.
Can some one tell me where to find an image editor that can work with these files (and what libs it's going to need) that can over come this problem?
I'm currently working on Fedora Core 6 with KDE despite what my profile says.

PS, The program(s) have to have good manipulation abilities.

The basic linux GUI program is ufraw. The background and origins of this are described on the webpage.

An alternative is Lightzone. This appears to be commercial for Windows/Mac but free for linux. I had look at it but found it a bit hard to understand - but I am certainly not an expert in this area.

I found ufraw did an OK job, but there are some things about the interface I never really figured out.

lightzone thoughts
 

Let me first preface this by saying that I evaluated this from a professional photographer's standpoint. From a tech side I'd consider myself somewhere between a power user and an annual defcon attendee. But photography is what I do for a living.

I tested this on vista but I noticed during instalation quite a few jar files. So I would assume the program would be very similar on all three platforms. It's dreadfully slow. from my point of view unusable for anything other than converting and editing a few images. it looks like they designed the user interface without ever stepping foot in a darkroom or watching the workflow of a modern photographer. again, it's very slow. the learning curve is not that bad if you know what you want to do with your image. the processing engine itself seems on par with many other good programs. it supports layers which is nice. it's just not easy to work with because the most used tools don't stand out. they're thrown in with the rest of the seldomly used functions. what I found amusing was the polarizing filter effect. a better name for that tool should have been dynamic lighting. I turn the program off after a few minutes because I couldn't stand the lag. there are basicaly two programs: the browser and the editor. you have to jump back and fourth with several seconds in between. this is on a 3.8ghz system with 2gb of ram.

conclusion: isn't anyone making a lightroom or apeture like program for linux? this program just doesn't cut it for a real library of images.

I have 320 meg RAM which is totally inadaquet for lightzone so Mum's ganna have to go with ufraw which brings the question of what libs will I need to install it in Fedora Core since it says that I need a cople more and I don't know if they are even in RPM format

I don't know anything about Fedora package management, but if you install ufraw from an RPM:

http://fancy.se/fc6-extras/repoview/....11-8.fc6.html

doesn't that take care of any dependencies?