THE GIMP Bible PHẦN 10 pot

Part VI Appendices IN THIS PART Appendix A Downloading and Installing GIMP Appendix B Setting Up External Input Devices Appendix C Customizing GIMP Appendix D Additional Resources Appendix E What’s on the Web Site Downloading and Installing GIMP IN THIS APPENDIX Downloading GIMP Installing GIMP on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh platforms O ne of the really cool things about GIMP is that its free nature makes it incredibly easy to get a copy installed on your computer. The only requirement — besides a computer — is an Internet connec- tion. GIMP works on Unix-based operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD as well as Microsoft Windows and Apple’s Mac OS. There’s even a commu- nity of users at PortableApps.com who distribute a version of GIMP that will run from a USB flash drive. There’s a direct URI and a bit more infor- mation on them in Appendix D, but basically they’ve made it so you can literally run GIMP on nearly any computer available. How’s that for cool? The most direct route to getting GIMP is by going to www.gimp.org and clicking the Download button. Depending on which operating system you’re using, the GIMP web site automatically loads a page with information on installing GIMP for your particular machine. Although that’s usually enough to get you going, there are a few ‘‘gotchas’’ that this appendix should help mitigate. Installing GIMP on Linux If you’re using one of the many Linux distributions out there, such as Fedora from Red Hat, chances are good that you may already have GIMP installed and you can probably find it under Graphics in your Applications menu. In fact, rather than going to www.gimp.org to download and install GIMP yourself, it’s recommended that you install it using the package management tool that your distribution uses, such as yum in Fedora. GIMP is available in the main package repositories for all of the main Linux distributions. Depending on how much you’ve adjusted or customized your installation, some of the graphical frontends that are mentioned in this section may not be used. Fortunately, each of these distributions offers package management from the terminal window as well. 649 Part VI: Appendices Debian/Ubuntu Probably one of the most popular Linux distributions right now is Ubuntu ( www.ubuntu.com) and its variants, including Ubuntu Studio, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Linux Mint. Ubuntu is actually based on another distribution called Debian, and they share the same basic package management system, based on the .deb file format. Ubuntu ships with a graphical package management tool called Synaptic Package Manager. To launch it from a standard Ubuntu system, go to the menu and choose System  Administration  Synaptic Package Manager. Upon doing so, you might be prompted to enter a password to allow you to install software. After doing that, you get a window like the one in Figure A-1. FIGURE A-1 Synaptic Package Manager The quickest way to get GIMP installed with this tool is to click the Search button and type gimp in the Search field of the dialog that pops up. After a quick hunt through the list of pack- ages in your repositories, Synaptic should provide you with results that list the most recent version of GIMP available. Click the check box next to the GIMP package to mark that pack- age for installation. There’s a chance that installing GIMP will also require that you install one or more dependencies, or other packages that GIMP requires to run. If that’s the case, Synaptic pops up a dialog to let you know what these dependencies are and requests your approval to install them. Click the Mark button on this dialog, and Synaptic knows to install these packages as well. Once you’ve done that, click the Apply button in the toolbar, and Synaptic pops up another dia- log to confirm installation. Click Apply once more, and Synaptic goes through the process of 650 Appendix A: Downloading and Installing GIMP downloading all of the required packages and automatically installing them for you. Depending on your Internet connection speed, this may take a little bit of time to complete, but when it’s done, you’ll have GIMP happily running on your computer. Figure A-2 shows this installation process. FIGURE A-2 Installing GIMP using Synaptic Package Manager Debian doesn’t ship with Synaptic by default. You can choose to install it if you’d like, but there’s another way to install GIMP without using the graphical interface — using the apt-get com- mand. This method actually works in Debian as well as all of its derivatives, including Ubuntu. To use it, you’ll have to get access to the command line. You can easily do this by opening a ter- minal window. Type su to become the administrator, or root user. At the next prompt type the following: apt-get install gimp An important thing to note here is that the Ubuntu distribution and its derivatives do not ship with a root user by default. If you’re on an Ubuntu machine and you want to use apt to install GIMP, you need to use sudo to perform administrative tasks. To do that, type the following text at your terminal window prompt: sudo apt-get install gimp 651 Part VI: Appendices After you press Enter, apt tracks down all dependencies required for GIMP and prompts you to confirm their installation. At that prompt, type Y and hit Enter. Apt will take it from there, downloading and installing all of the necessary packages for you. For some of the additional functionality in this book, you may want to install some GIMP plug-ins such as G’MIC, Liquid Rescale, and the GIMP Animation Package. Each of these plug-ins can be pulled from the GIMP Plugin Registry, mentioned in Chapter 21, but you can also install them directly using Synaptic or apt. If you’re using Synaptic, do a search for the following terms: gimp-plugin-registry and gimp-gap. Using apt, just type the following as root: apt-get install gimp-plugin-registry gimp-gap Doing so will get you the veritable motherload of useful GIMP plug-ins. Fedora The Fedora distribution (www.fedoraproject.org), based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), ships with a package management utility similar to Ubuntu’s Synaptic, called Pack- ageKit. As Figure A-3 shows, PackageKit works very similarly to Synaptic. Open it by clicking System  Administration  Add/Remove Software. Once it appears, type gimp in the search field on the left and click Find. From there, the process is about the same. You click the check box next to GIMP’s package to mark it for installation and then click the Apply button in the lower-right corner. PackageKit handles the rest, determining the necessary dependencies, downloading all required packages, and installing them on your computer. FIGURE A-3 Fedora’s PackageKit package manager 652 Appendix A: Downloading and Installing GIMP Installing from the command line in Fedora is also slightly different than in Debian or Ubuntu. Fedora is based on another package format called RPM and uses a tool called yum for command-line package management. To use this in Fedora, open up a terminal window and, as the root user, type the following: yum install gimp Yum finds all of the package dependencies that GIMP requires and prompts you to confirm their installation. Type Y, press Enter to confirm, and wait for yum to download and install each pack- age. When it’s done, you’ll be treated to a world of GIMP awesomeness. As with Ubuntu, there’s a large package of plug-ins for GIMP called gimpfx-foundry. To install that package as well as the additional GREYCstoration, Liquid Rescale, and GIMP Animation Package plug-ins, use Pack- ageKit or type in the following in the terminal window: yum install gimpfx-foundry greycstoration gimp-lqr-plugin gimp-gap Once you press Enter and confirm any additional dependencies, you should be ready to rock. If you want to install additional plug-ins, you can also use PackageKit as a quick way to search for them by name. OpenSUSE OpenSUSE (www.opensuse.org) is like Fedora in that it’s an RPM-based distribution. However, it uses a different tool for managing those packages. Graphically, it uses a tool called YaST, which is short for Yet another Setup Tool. OpenSUSE installations typically use either the KDE or Gnome desktop environments and each environment has a slightly different way of getting to YaST. In KDE, click the ‘‘geeko,’’ which is the kickoff-applet tool, and click Computer  YaST. You are prompted for your root password and then YaST opens. In GNOME, start YaST by choosing Control Center  YaST from the main menu. In doing this, you are also prompted for your root password before continuing. YaST then opens with a window like the oneinFigureA-4. FIGURE A-4 The YaST interface 653 Part VI: Appendices Once YaST is up, click the Software tab in the Control Center. The window that pops up, called YaST2, is very similar to the Synaptic Package Manager. If you’re using the KDE release of Open- SUSE, you can actually also access this window directly from the geeko menu by clicking Com- puter  Install Software. On the left panel, type gimp in the Search field and press Enter. This should find GIMP in your OpenSUSE repositories. Click the check box next to GIMP to mark it for installation. When you’re done with that, click the Accept button at the bottom right of the window. YaST hunts down the dependencies you need and requests your confirmation. After you confirm, you’ll have GIMP and be ready to go. Figure A-5 shows the YaST2 package manager interface. FIGURE A-5 Installing GIMP with the YaST graphical interface Like the other distributions, OpenSUSE provides you with a way to install GIMP from the com- mand line. Depending on your version of OpenSUSE, you can either use YaST from the com- mand line or use its intended replacement, zypper, which appeared in OpenSUSE 10.3 and has since matured. So if you’re installing from the command line, open a terminal window, become root user, and type the following: zypper in gimp If you’re using an older copy of OpenSUSE, use YaST by typing the following, again as root: yast -i gimp In either case, the tool finds all the necessary dependencies and prompts you for their installa- tion. After you confirm and wait for the packages to be downloaded and installed, you’ll have GIMP goodness to work with. 654 Appendix A: Downloading and Installing GIMP Installing G’MIC and Liquid Rescale in OpenSUSE is a bit more difficult because they don’t appear in the package repository. For those, it would be best to download them from the GIMP Plugin Registry. The GIMP Animation Package, however, is in the repository, so you should be able to install it with YaST or zypper. You can search for it in the YaST2 interface or, in a termi- nal window, type: zypper in gimp-gap Or, for older versions of OpenSUSE, type the following: yast -i gimp-gap Gentoo Gentoo (www.gentoo.org) is called a source-based Linux distribution, meaning that all of the programs and libraries are compiled on your computer directly from their source code before installation. This means installation can take much longer than on the binary-based distribu- tions mentioned in this section. It also offers a somewhat more unique challenge when it comes to package management. To deal with this task, Gentoo uses a system called portage, which is accessed from the terminal with the command emerge. Installing GIMP is as straightforward as opening a terminal window, becoming the root user, and typing the following: emerge -av gimp The -av flag isn’t necessary, but it helps give you a much clearer understanding of the dependencies that portage will download, compile, and install on your system. Gentoo also provides access to the GREYCstoration, Liquid Rescale, and GIMP Animation Package plug-ins. For GREYCstoration, it’s as simple as typing: emerge -av greycstoration However, for the other two, you’ll have to use an overlay repository, a package repository that’s not part of the official Gentoo distribution, but instead managed by the community. You’re look- ing for two overlays: sunrise and ibormuth. To use overlays, you’ll need to install a program called layman (overlay manager). The entire process goes as follows (each line is a separate com- mand you type at the terminal prompt as root and wait for it to complete): emerge -av layman layman -a sunrise ibormuth emerge -av gimp-lqr-plugin gimp-gap And with that, you’ll have GIMP installed, along with some very handy plug-ins. Mandriva Like Fedora and OpenSUSE, Mandriva (www.mandriva.com) is an RPM-based distribution, but it too comes with its own package management software. As a graphical frontend, Mandriva uses Rpmdrake. To launch Rpmdrake, open the Mandriva Linux Control Center, choose Software Management, and click the icon for Install & Remove Software. This launches Rpmdrake, shown in Figure A-6. 655 [...]... GIMP via MacPorts Installing GIMP on OS X Of the two ways of installing GIMP on a Mac, the first one — GIMP on OS X — is the most straightforward and simple to do If you click the GIMP on OS X link from www .gimp. org, you will be directed to the site shown in Figure A-11 When you click the Download GIMP on OS X button, you are given the choice of universal binaries for different versions of OS X, either... GIMP on Windows is extremely easy The GIMP web site at www .gimp. org gives you a direct download link for the latest version of GIMP for Windows at the top of the page It also gives you a link to the main GIMP for Windows web site at http:/ /gimp- win sourceforge.net This site has a bit more information that’s specific to running GIMP on Windows The Download page for this site is shown in Figure A-7; the. .. and YaST2 Type gimp in the Find field at the top, and Rpmdrake shows GIMP in its list of available packages Click the check box next to GIMP s package to mark it for installation and then click the Apply button at the bottom of the window Rpmdrake tracks down all of the necessary dependencies and asks for your confirmation before downloading and installing them And then, poof!, you have GIMP Mandriva... download button Figure A-9 shows the GIMP Portable web site FIGURE A-9 The GIMP Portable web site is where you go to get a copy of GIMP that you can run virtually anywhere After you download the GIMP Portable installer, double-click it to launch it The installation process is nearly identical to the regular GIMP for Windows installation, with one major exception: the GIMP Portable installer explicitly... install any additional plug-ins, such as the GIMP Animation Package, you need to go to the GIMP Plugin Registry web site at http://registry .gimp. org and follow the Mac OS X installation instructions for each of those plug-ins 661 Part VI: Appendices FIGURE A-11 The GIMP on OS X web site Installing GIMP from MacPorts The MacPorts system is a bit more involved than the GIMP on OS X project, but it has some... accompanying GIMP plug-in for Windows, you need to visit the GIMP Plugin Registry at the following address: http://registry .gimp. org/node/14567 Download the zip file from that page and open it once it’s on your computer Within the zip file is a subfolder named plug-ins Copy the contents of that subfolder to the folder where GIMP looks for plug-ins By default, this should be C:\Program Files \GIMP- 2.0\lib \gimp\ 2.0\plug-ins\... values in the Left, Right, Top, and Bottom entry fields near the bottom of the dialog You define the units for these dimensions by clicking the Size Units tab at the top of the dialog and choosing the units you want to use Gutenprint is set to use inches by default Also, Gutenprint gives you more immediate feedback if you adjust the scaling of your image relative to the paper As you adjust the Scaling... that you have the ability to adjust the scale of the image going to the printer This is particularly useful if you need to print out a small draft version of your image before printing out a full-sized copy Also notice that there is nothing in this tab that allows you to control the orientation of your image on the paper or the size of the paper itself If you need to change either of these things,... you have GIMP installed, there’s a good chance that you already have Gutenprint up and available You can check by launching GIMP and looking for File Print with Gutenprint If that’s there, you’re done and you can go to the next section Otherwise, visit the download page at http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/p Download.php and follow the links and instructions there to download the dmg file with the Gutenprint... GREYCstoration, Liquid Rescale, and the GIMP Animation Package You can find them with the search terms greycstoration, gimp- lqr-plugin, and gimp- gap, respectively You can also use the command line to install GIMP, if you’re more inclined to manage your software that way You do this with the urpmi command If you open a terminal window and become root, you can install GIMP along with the additional plug-ins covered . type gimp in the search field on the left and click Find. From there, the process is about the same. You click the check box next to GIMP s package to mark it for installation and then click the. install GIMP via MacPorts. Installing GIMP on OS X Of the two ways of installing GIMP on a Mac, the first one — GIMP on OS X — is the most straightforward and simple to do. If you click the GIMP. difficult because they don’t appear in the package repository. For those, it would be best to download them from the GIMP Plugin Registry. The GIMP Animation Package, however, is in the repository,