I'd like to see fancier color management systems and support on software such as gimp. Photoshop and some others have that, and I'm not crazy in love about the PS interface despite of that being so common*, albeit is partly an OS thing I think. I've heard that Mac OS' color management is superior to windows'.



* - I actually like gimp's interface, without a window-container. The most important improvements that gimp could have are not at the interface level, it seems it gets beaten badly by photoshop on benchmarks. Albeit the benchmarks in question were made with a 64 bits PS versus a 32 bits gimp. But it's not that unfair as a merely pragmatic comparison as there's no 64 bits gimp anyway. It does not mean much as a technological comparison of code though, I guess.[COLOR="Silver"]

Actually PS's colour management isn't all that great - at least not if you want to give a JPG/TIF to someone who hasn't got PS (or some other decent image viewer with embedded ICM support), e.g. we constantly have issues with someone opening the JPG in some arb viewer such as Windows' built-in which then even screws up pure white to be some dirty brownish colour. Gimp does have some colour management through LittleCMS (in a plugin) but it's far behind the "full" system in PS. Actually I love CorelDraw's colour management a lot more than even that of PS - makes it a lot more understandable about what's actually happening. With PS it's a bit of trial-n-error all the time.

You're correct about Windows' "built-in" colour management being less useful than that on Mac. Though I think it's more because of the programs not actually adhering to the ICM tools inside of windows. Most of these programs go and run their own ICM support (most notably PS & CorelDraw). Though in some cases this then interferes with Win's ICM and you get a scenario where the colour is adjusted twice - i.e. overshooting the "correction".

I'm not sure how far the ICM support on linux is, though I've seen some projects trying to achieve a more professional colour management on linux. Maybe someone else knows if there's a more comprehensive system already available. It would be nice if such system would work throughout all programs through a consistent interface - so you don't end up with the problems faced on windows.

As for 64bit Gimp - there are some "experimental" 64bit versions available. I'm actually running Gimp 2.6.11 64bit on Win 7 Pro 64. Seems to work fine for me - not to mention quite fast (at least comparable to PS 64 on the same system). There's other features where I like Gimp more than PS, and visa-versa. E.g. creating vector paths from selections to export to vector based programs is a lot simpler in Gimp than PS, selecting a layer by picking on its graphics works nicer in PS, shadow effects on layers works easier in PS though it's nice to have the joined shadow layer to manipulate in gimp. A bit of a toss-up really. As for the interface, IMO Gimp wins hands down - PS just doesn't have the consistency in options available displayed properly (it's a constant search to find where to adjust something like the magic wand's sensitivity), whereas Gimp always has those options displayed in the same place - no need to go searching throughout the entire screen to find that for some reason the programmer has placed this setting in a hidden palette (which seems to have nothing to do with the currently active tool).

I'd like to see AutoSketch in Linux... I do not do much drafting, but this legacy XP program
by AutoDesk I learned early on and I know its commands so when I need to draw a CAD of some
woodworking project I have to fire up my old XP machine (and hope its the aging on/off switch
works.) I run Linux in my contemporary Desktop and Laptop computers these days, with Android
hidden somewhere at the low level of our HTC cell phones.

I have noodled with the idea of opening the can of worms of figuring out how to get a virtual
XP working on my late 2009 purchased quad core HP Pavilion so that I can run an AutoSketch.
With the exception of an occasional CAD I now do deverything better and faster on my Linux platforms
using Libre Office, GIMP, FileZilla, JOOMLA, Thunderbird, FireFox etc.

I have briefly toyed with an open source product said to be comparable. But the amount of detail
required takes a lot of practice with any CAD system before it is can become a practicqal part of my
personal toolkit. Thus AutoDesk's AutoSketch is the one application that forces me to keep my
circa 2003 acquired XP machine alive for the occasional CAD that I use to illustrate projects on
my www.helmers.com site.

For simple requirements like this (running a single critical application on XP) installing VirtualBox takes you about 6 minutes + 4 minutes to figure out how to set up a shared directory.

jlinkels

carl@helmers.com: Carl - I would like to encourage you to run AutoSketch in a VirtualBox environment. If you have a quad core, you should find that it runs as well as on bare iron, and I speak from experience. I, like you, use Linux for virtually everything but 3d modelling, and as much as I hate to admit it, there are no open source tools that can replace Autodesk's Inventor - so I run it on XP under VirtualBox. Given that you have a quad core, I would suggest that you install XP with 2 cores allocated to the virtual machine. I am not exaggerating when I say that I simply mounted the AutoCad disks in my XP virtual machine and ran the install without a single problem. I am able to run full 3D modelling and drive my 3D printer directly from Virtual XP while simultaneously running one or two other apps under Linux with no apparent loss of performance.

My only other suggestion is that if you are running debian or a debian derivative (ubuntu, etc), that you add the VirtualBox repository (goto https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads and read the instructions there). Whatever you do, make sure that you install the VirtualBox from the VirtualBox download site, and also, download and install the extension pack, which will give you full USB support (you may need this).

Best of luck

The VB idea works in most cases. From my experience, the only issue is graphics RAM. You can "up the anti" to max out at 128 mb. But for stuff like Revit 2012 that's below its min requirements - so it won't even install!

I've had to go with a dual boot to get Revit running on W7-64 as the min RAM to work on anything worthwhile is 4gb. Revit 2009 does work on a VB XP-32, but much slower than on a bare metal system. The renderings are fine, but that's not where I spend most of my time. 90% is spent on creating the model - i.e. using the GPU to zoom, pan & rotate the view, which is like molasses in VB.

There's some discussion about that 128MB limitation on the VirtualBox site, for example this thread here, including this post here which talks about hacking the .vbox file to increase the limit to 256MB. My understanding of it is that VirtualBox isn't using your GPU to do 3D acceleration, it's doing software emulated "3D acceleration" much like the Intel GMA drivers. It's the software emulation that's giving you molasses instead of glee.

May be VMware Player is worth a try, I had far better 3D performance with that. I don't have it installed, so I can't say anything about the maximum of VRAM you can set.

Nope, tried that one as well. Also tried M$'s Virtual machine on W7 with a XP installed (seeing as some of the older ADesk products have difficulty running on Vista/W7 - especially 64bit), also with an OSX on VMWare and ACad 2011 for Mac. 3d Performance is nothing to speak of, let alone write home about.

The software acceleration is probably why it's so slow. But Revit 2012 requires a minimum 512 MB graphics RAM to even install, it simply opens a dialog stating that your resources are insufficient for this program and then closes the install process. I know of some who've installed it on bare-metal (no VM) laptops with that shared RAM on something like those IBM GPU's (or even the built-in GPU in the i3/5/7 SandyBridge), but only if they set the shared RAM equal/higher than the required 512 MB. They tend to get bad 3d performance (even with high graphics RAM), but still a bit better than the VM with older Revits - i.e. at least those GPU's have "some" acceleration instead of a virtual driver to the CPU back to the host's driver to the "real" GPU, there's no such thing as DMA in that chain of software is there?

One would think that with most "decent" GPU's having 10's (if not 100's) of cores it might be simple to link to the GPU & its RAM in a similar manner as is done to the CPU and the base RAM. Perhaps there needs to be some hardware interface that nVidia / AMD needs to open for these VM's to actually "perform"? Good luck with that, it only took them a decade to finally give linux drivers, and only because some open source projects made it happen for them.

IBM GPUs? Umm, nope, that would be intel (and I wouldnt call any intel video chip a 'GPU', they lag so far behind the nVidia/AMD GPUs).

I wouldnt be suprised about bad 3D performance with intel video chips, even the new 'sandy bridge' 'GPU on a CPU' models. Sharing main memory for use as video memory has an impact, more I/Os on the main memory = slower performance. Besides the fact that intel 'GPUs' tend to have far less pixel pipelines than even the slowest nVidia/AMD GPUs.

Sorry yes, you're correct. It was either a mistype or a misremember - probably both!

I was trying to show the experience I've had. I certainly don't advocate using those "GPU"'s when working with anything 3D - the only program I'd be willing to run on one of those would be something like a word processor. They're not meant to be used for such anyway. All I'm saying is even these have better 3D performance than the "software" GPU of a virtual machine.

However, I agree that web design tools - Flash, Dreamweaver, etc should be ported. I don't see why developers can't produce either a Linux version seperately or include it in the main packaging.I'd be willing to pay full price for them.I'd like to see fancier color management systems and support on software such as gimp. Photoshop and some others have that, and I'm not crazy in love about the PS interface despite of that being so common*, albeit is partly an OS thing I think. I've heard that Mac OS' color management is superior to windows'.

does anybody use foobar2000, the music player? it runs ok in wine...it's known to take a dump though when my NFS server crashes (to the point of freezing everything and killing the pulse audio module).

maybe the problem would happen anyway if it were native on here? i dunno, i just dont like running wine for my music player and wish it were a package.

You could take a look at foobnix, i tried it a while ago and decided to stick to banshee. But it might have improved over this time.

To XavierP

Good call to separate games & utilities into different threads (call it common sense), but still some may fall through the cracks. Like game creation apps. 'Is it a game or a utility?'