But I’m a developer by trade so there should be no reason I cannot figure out.  So this blog entry is all about getting that done.

Required Packages

• BABL
• GEGL
  • Ruby (when building from the git repository)
  • lua-devel
  • OpenEXR-devel
  • librsvg2-devel
  • libopenraw-devel
  • graphviz
  • avformat
  • libspiro-devel
• GIMP
  • jasper library
  • libpoppler
  • libwmf
  • libexif

These are just the packages that were not found the first time I tried to build things on Fedora 11.  On other systems (including Windows and Macs) you’ll may have other requirements, especially if you don’t use GNOME on your desktop at all.  Fedora 11 didn’t seem to have a version of avformat so I skipped it.  I installed libpoppler (runtime and devel packages) but GIMP didn’t like that so the PDF support was built using the Postscript plug-in.

The list of packages available from the GIT repository is available from the GIMP Developer web site.  This list does not list the prerequisites that are not part of the GIMP GIT repository.

Getting The Source

Git requires two steps to get the code.  The first is called a clone, which gets the source sufficient to build the tree.  The second step, checkout, actually checks out the source so that you can make modifications and check them back in.   A third step, config, allows configuration of general details such as your user name and email address.  Only the first step is required if all you want to do is built GIMP from the source tree in order to get all the latest features and bug fixes and are not intending to make source code changes to submit back to the project.  All of this information can be found on the GNOME GIT pages.

Compiling Order

Building the GIMP is easy at the moment because there are only two real dependencies that can’t be satisfied by just installing prebuilt development packages.  This won’t always be the case as development of the 2.7 version progresses.

For now, you can get away with building in the following order:

• BABL
• GEGL
• GIMP

Building Into a Development Directory

If you build all the prerequisites into a single directory it will make it easier to compile prerequisites and run programs later.  Therefore we choose a single directory: /usr/local/gimpgit.   To use this directory for the build we’re going to want to add some environment variable settings:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/gimpgit/lib/pkgconfig/:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/gimpgit/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

The first variable is used to find pkg-config configuration files for prerequisite libraries.  The second is used to find runtime libraries of prerequisite packages during the build.  In both cases we’re placing the location to look for file of interest from the build directory tree ahead of any other configurations we might have previously set such as in our .bashrc file.  In this way we’ll pick up the new builds first and then pick up the old versions later if the new versions haven’t been built yet.  This will cause the build of each prerequisite to behave in the expected fashion, informing us of missing requirements.

Build Process

The GIMP packages (BABL, GEGL and GIMP) are all built using the autogen.sh script.  This is a front end to the autoconf/automake/libtool configuration contained in the source tree that makes it easy to create the Makefiles throughout the tree.  The general format of the command is as follows:

./autogen.sh –prefix=/usr/local/gimpgit

Running autogen.sh in the gimp source tree the first time will print out the results of simple tests to verify that you have required build tools, such as autoconf and automake.  When autogen.sh is run it will also run the configure script it creates which in turn will do additional searches for required packages.  It is at this point that the build will detect if you have the proper prerequisite libraries installed such as BABL and GEGL.

In order to find out what prerequisites I was missing I just ran autogen.sh once in the GIMP tree.  It told me I was missing babl, which I then built and installed.  I then ran the same autogen.sh command but substituted configure for autogen.sh because the latter will rebuild everything while the former (configure) will just run the configuration processing.  In other words, autogen.sh is needed once to build the configure script. After that you can usually just run configure instead.

BABL

After running autogen.sh, run the following commands:

• make
• sudo make install

GEGL

After installing the myriad of prerequisites and running autogen.sh, run the following commands:

• make
• sudo make install

GIMP

Fortunately it doesn’t appear that you need to update GTK+ and its related libraries for GIMP.  At least not at this time and not with GIMP 2.7 out of the git repository.

After installing the myriad of prerequisites and running autogen.sh, run the following commands:

• make
• sudo make install

Running GIMP

Now that you have it all built you just need to make sure the the build directories are the first in your PATH environment variable.  The best way to do this without affecting the rest of you desktop experience is to write a little script and use it to launch the development version.

#!/bin/bash

export PATH=/usr/local/gimpgit/bin:$PATH

gimp-2.7

Note that the program name is not “gimp”.  You can now run the development version of GIMP.  This version will create a new runtime directory in the users home:  .gimp-2.7.  GIMP will import its settings from your old .gimp-2.6 directory or even your .gimp-2.4 directory if you skipped 2.6 altogether.

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You will need GEGL 0.1.0 and babl 0.1.0 found at http://www.gegl.org and http://www.gegl.org/babl to build GIMP 2.7.0. The GIMP 2.7 release notes can be read at http://gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.7.html. A more complete but summarized list of changes is in the NEWS file found at http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gim/tree/NEWS. This file is also quoted below.

/ Martin

Changes in GIMP 2.7.0
=====================

UI:

- Change the Text Tool to perform text editing on-canvas (GSoC 2008)
- Add support for tagging GIMP resources such as brushes and allow filtering based on these tags (GSoC 2008)
- Separate the activies of saving an image and exporting it, there is now an ‘File->Export…’ for example
- Port file plug-ins to new export API which gets rid of many annoying export dialogs
- Add a simple parser to size entry widgets, images can be scaled to e.g. “50%” or “2 * 37px + 10in”
- Arrange layer modes into more logical and useful groups
- Added support for rotation of brushes
- Make the Pointer dockable show information about selection position and size
- Get rid of the Tools dockable and move toolbox configuration to Preferences
- Add status bar feedback for keyboard changes to brush paramaters
- Add diagonal guides to the Crop Tool
- New docks are created at the pointer position
- Add support for printing crop marks for images
- Move ‘Text along path’ from tool options to text context menu
- Change default shortcuts for “Shrink Wrap” and “Fit in Window” to Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R respectively since the previous shortcuts are now used for the save+export feature
- Make Alt+Click on layers in Layers dockable create a selection from the layer
- Allow to specify written language in the Text Tool

Plug-ins:

- Map the ‘Linear Dodge’ layer mode in PSD files to the ‘Addition’ layer mode in GIMP
- Add JPEG2000 load plug-in
- Add X11 mouse cursor plug-in
- Add support for loading 16bit (RGB565) raw data
- Add palette exporter for CSS, PHP, Python, txt and Java, accessed through palette context menu
- Add plug-in API for getting image URI, for manipulating size of text layers, for getting and setting text layer hint, and for unified export dialog appearance

Data:

- Add large variants of round brushes and remove duplicate and useless brushes
- Add “FG to BG (Hardedge)” gradient

GEGL:

- Port the projection code, the code that composes a single image from a stack of layers, to GEGL
- Port layer modes to GEGL
- Port the floating selection code to GEGL
- Refactor the layer stack code to prepare for layer groups later
- Prepare better and more intuitive handling of the floating selection
- Add File->Debug->Show Image Graph that show the GEGL graph of an image
- Allow to benchmark projection performance with File->Debug->Benchmark Projection
- When using GEGL for the projection, use CIELCH instead of HSV/HSL for color based layer modes

Core:

- Make painting strokes Catmull-Rom Spline interpolated
- Add support for arbitrary affine transforms of brushes
- Add support for brush dynamics to depend on tilt
- Add aspect ratio to brush dynamics
- Add infrastructure to soon support vector layers (GSoC 2006)
- Rearrange legacy layer mode code to increase maintainability
- Drop support for the obsolete GnomeVFS file-uri backend
- Allow to dump keyboard shortucts ith File->Debug->Dump Keyboard Shortcuts
- Prepare data structures for layer groups
- Remove gimprc setting “menu-mnemonics”, “GtkSettings:gtk-enable-mnemonics” shall be used instead
- Remove “transient-docks” gimprc setting, the ‘Utility window’ hint and a sane window manager does a better job
- Remove “web-browser” gimprc setting and use gtk_show_uri() instead

General:

- Changed licence to (L)GPLv3+
- Use the automake 1.11 feature ’silent build rules’ by default
- Lots of bug fixes and cleanup

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We recommend that you also update GEGL and babl to the latest released versions, see http://gegl.org/

Overview of Changes from GIMP 2.6.6 to GIMP 2.6.7
=================================================

* Bugs fixed:

591017 – Tablet pan is not working as fast as it should
577581 – Crashes when using any colors tool/function on Windows
589667 – GIMP crashes when clicking GEGL Operation on Windows
569833 – file-jpeg-save erroneous with small quality values
590638 – Changing palettes from list to grid view loses “locked  to dock” status
589674 – “Send by Email” does not update “Filename”
589674 – “Send by Email” does not update “Filename”
586851 – Transparent BMP files fail to load
589205 – help-browser uses deprecated (and sometimes broken) webkit call
582821 – ‘Sphere Designer’ does not reset correctly…
570353 – first time open of .svg file ignores the requested units
555777 – Export to MNG animation fails
577301 – Dithering with transparency is broken for “positioned” method
493778 – metadata plug-in crashes on some images
567466 – PNG comment not found if more than 1 tEXt chunks
585665 – Exporting to PSD with a blank text layer creates a corrupt file
586316 – Levels tool does not adjust output levels correctly if input levels are changed
569661 – Import from PDF throws errors when entering resolution in pixels per millimetre
567262 – Black pixels appear in “Spread” filter preview
554658 – Path Dialog: Path preview pics not to see constantly
167604 – gimp_gradient_get_color_at() may return out-of-bounds values
567393 – Rectangle select tool size shrinks to 0 if size is larger than the image and the up or down arrow is pressed
587543 – crash when invoking certain actions by keyboard shortcut
563029 - Closing maximized image doesn’t restore document window size
585488 – Perspective transformation on a layer with a mask causes crash
586008 - GIMP crashes when right-click canceling a drawing action initiated outside layer boundaries
584345 – when printing, the number of copies should be reset to 1
557061 – Alpha to Logo
472644 – Rotate with clipping crops the whole layer
577575 – transform tool fills underlying extracted area wrongly
555738 – Image display is wrong after undoing canvas size
577024 – help-browser plugin crashes when used with webkit 1.1.3
555025 – Action GEGL box widgets weirdness

* Updated and new translations:

Czech (cs)
Danish (da)
German (de)
Spanish (es)
Basque (eu)
Finnish (fi)
Hungarian (hu)
Italian (it)
Gujarati (gu)
Japanese (ja)
Kannada (kn)
Marathi (mr)
Norwegian bokmål (nb)
Oriya (or)
Portuguese (pt)
Romanian (ro)
Sinhala (si)
Swedish (sv)
Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)
Traditional Chinese - Hong Kong (zh_HK)
Traditional Chinese - Taiwan (zh_TW)

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I’m especially proud of Decay.  Take a look at the before and after shot to get an idea of how a simple photo can be seriously modified using GIMP.

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I mentioned some time ago that I was reading The Artist’s Guide to GIMP Effects, by michael j. hammel, and that over time I’d report on what I thought about it.  Ok, here’s what I think about it. WOW!

I still have a long way to go to absorb everything in here, but in a few weeks I’ve gone from someone who’s messed around with Gimp for a few years but still felt lost, to someone who knows the principles behind using it as a tool.

Many of the questions people ask here seem obvious after reading and working with it for awhile.

He does a great job of teaching you the basic principles that let you solve problems.  You start thinking about what you want, instead of looking at what Gimp can do.

If you need to combine pictures, fix problems, do commercial graphics, web work, original art–this book is for you.  I’m astonished.

I’ll report back some more after spending a few more weeks with it.

It doesn’t cover 2.6, but it hasn’t been an issue using it with 2.6.  If you want to be a GIMP master, check it out!

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So I was interested to hear that Kodak had announced a TWAIN based scanner interface for Linux.  The package is called ScanTWAIN and appears to be a front end to TWAIN drivers for a variety of Kodak scanners. The annoucned product is actually just the front end application which is GPL and which is available in both a generic RPM and source.  The backend drivers, which in TWAIN-speak are known as Data Sources or .ds files, are not GPL.  The backend drivers packages are available for download from each specific models web page.  For example, the i210 Scanner web page offers driver downloads for both Windows and Linux.  You can find links to each supported model in the Kodak press release.

The binary RPM requires libtwaindsm.so which is the library applications need to link to in order to get access to the TWAIN drivers.  Apparently this library is not available yet for Fedora 10 in RPM format.  Instead, the library is installed as part of the Linux drivers package for each specific Kodak scanner model.

There is good write up on how Kodak got it wrong with packaging and, to some extent, adherence to the GPL principles (though I won’t go so far as to say they’ve violated any of the license - at least not as far as I can tell).   Most of the problem, in my opinion, is packaging.  For example, the OpenUSB library is included but there is no README on where a user could acquire the sources from Kodak.  Also, the package appears to install in multiple locations, including /opt, /usr/local and /usr.  At first this seems like the right thing to do:  system packages under /usr/local so they don’t interfere with similar packages installed by the distribution while the Kodak specific applications go under /opt.  But on closer inspection I found that some of the RPMs included with the driver package install some Kodak specifics under /opt while others (like the .ds files and scanner profiles) under /usr/local/lib/twain/kodak.  Why not put them all under /opt?  Hell, they even put a configuration file (.ini) under /var/kodak!

All in all it looks like Kodak is taking a big leap but they still have some work to do with understanding the Linux environment.  I’m not as disappointed as the other reviewer that the drivers are not open source (though I highly encourage them to reconsider) but I’m less interested in installing packages that place files in the wrong directories.

If you’re interested in TWAIN you can check out the main TWAIN.org web site.  It has all the gory details.

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Update: I’ve also rewritten this translation back into OpenOffice and PDF formats and improved upon the format and grammer slightly.

Enjoy!

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Overview of Changes from GIMP 2.6.4 to GIMP 2.6.5
=================================================

* Bugs fixed:

571628 - Scaling image to 25% turn background from white to grey
567840 - GIMP’s GtkScaleButton conflicts with GTK’s
569043 - GEGL tool - missing Operation Settings for all sub-tools
568890 - don’t rely on GtkAction implementation details
568909 - wrong RGB values for color names in libgimpcolor/gimprgb-parse.c
568839 - wrong hex RGB value for the color names slategrey and slategray
559408 - Brushes dragged to the image window look strange
563337 - Rectangle Select Tool does not allow 1:1 fixed ratio
568016 - Black pullout parameter of plug-in-newsprint has no effect
562818 - First image opened in GIMP offset
562213 - Align Tool doesn’t work properly if it is the active tool at startup

* Updated translations:

Spanish (es)
Estonian (et)
Hindi (hi)
Italian (it)
Brazilian Portuguese (pt_BR)
Romanian (ro)
Russian (ru)
Serbian (sr)
Tamil (ta)
Simplified Chinese (zh_CN)

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I have attached a patch to Bug 74224 – Add support for 16 bits per channel that makes it possible to use GIMP for opening, color correcting and saving 16-bits-per-channel PNGs using the operations under the Colors menu that are ported to GEGL such as Color Balance or Levels. For a technical description of the patch, refer to the bug report.

…

Welcome to the start of the 16-bit GIMP era

Martin also questioned whether it was time to consider shooting for at least particla 16-bit support in 2.8.  According to his research:

[Martin doesn't] think it will be hard to add support for loading some additional 16-bit image formats, allowing creation of 16-bit images and adding 16-bit capabilities to a set of basic tools.

So the first public step toward 16-bit channels has seen the light of day.  Now it’s not clear if this patch has been accepted into the mainline (I don’t think that decision was made on the mailing list, if its been made at all - the bug report has no additional information on that) but at least a public note of work in this area has surfaced, something beyond just working on getting gegl prepared for use by GIMP developers.  Now it’s actually in use.

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The site also has a tutorials section that is primarily aimed at Photoshop users.  Experienced users should always consider tutorials of this type when trying to come up with techniques in GIMP.  Most of the things you can do in Photoshop you can do in GIMP, though you may have to perform them in a different way.

The texture downloads are limited to 15MB per day per user.  A random sample of the available images showed that most come at least 3 sizes with the largest size usually under 3MB and often under 1MB.  Larger images are available to members of the site, if you’re interested in signing up.

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