The Ultimate Guide to Linux Digital Photography Software - Introduction

I had been using digikam for several years to manage my collection of digital photographs. With the recent purchase of a new DSLR (my first I might add), I was looking to see what else was out there in the terms of software, functionality, features, costs, etc. At the same time, while looking on the net to see what was available, I found many people looking for the same things as I. There was also a lot of mis-information out there. Due to the popularity of our Ultimate Linux Guides to ....I decided to create this one.

In this article, I will list some of the software that is out there along with a basic description and their homepage url's. I will randomly pick the software as I try it out and add to this collection, tentively entitled, "The Ultimate Linux Digital Photography Guide". This guide will help you chose the correct workflow that works for you.

Please use the talk-back forum to discuss this article, make suggestions or recommendations or corrections, add your insight, or add to the articles.

There are many virus scanners available for Linux, although Linux is generally immune to virus's. These virus scanners can be used to scan files and folders for virus's and also to scan email for virus's. One that I like to use is clamav. There are both linux and Windows clients available and it is free. The Windows client even has some features not available on other Windows virus scanners, such as the ability to do hourly updates and the ability to send an email notification in the event it detects an infected file or email. However, this tutorial will focus specifically on using the Linux version of clamav along with some of the gui's available, and an easy way to configure pop/imap mail clients such as kmail, thunderbird, and evolution to use clamav.

Clam AntiVirus is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool for automatic database updates. The core of the package is an anti-virus engine available in a form of shared library.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe.

• From the moment you enter the World you'll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you've explored a bit, perhaps you'll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.
  
  
• You'll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow Residents. Because Residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other Residents.
  
  
• The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden Dollar exchanges.

Here is a screen shot before I get into the installation and fixing a bug I found in the current linux beta release.

Intro

First, I am not a gamer for any platform (Windows, Linux, Playstation, Wii, Xbox, etc). That wasn't always the case. When I was growing up, I had about every game console that existed....the first generation atari that did pong, the third generation ColecoVision, the atari 2600, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64. I even own a playstation and a playstation 2, yet I never really ever played them -- and only a handful of times in the last 10 years, with the most recent being guitar hero 3 with my daughter on the Wii on christmas day. I still own the atari and colecovision and they still work too.

My point is it takes a lot to excite me enough to play a game. I have never really every played computer games, outside of solitair and killbill. I wrote about Frets On Fire recently and it received some pretty good attention. So, I decided to take a stab at another game or two or three....just to see what I have been missing over the years.

Nexuiz

Nexuiz is a 3d deathmatch game project, created online by a team of developers called Alientrap. It is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux (all the same archive).The first version was released May 31st 2005, released entirely GPL and free over the net, a first for a project of its kind. Since then it has been downloaded over half a million times, and the game is still being updated and developed, currently at version 2.3 and new releases being developed.

Before I get into telling you about Nexuiz by alientrap, take a look at one of the screen shot here which you can click for a larger version (more later in the article).

This article will discuss extending fuse file system from our previous article to allow you to mount a remote directory locally over an ssh connection. There are a couple of uses for this type of connection, but the one that immediately comes to mind is for backing up.

For example, I have several large partitions to backup but I am running out of disk space. Even if I only backup the directories I need, some of them will exceed the file space I have locally.

A solution (there are several) is to use an archiving program, such as tar and piping its standard output into netcat locally, which sends the data over the network to a listening netcat session, which then reassymbles the files and compresses them into an archive. This would looks something like this:

On the local machine:

# tar zcfp - /path/to/directory | nc -w 3 127.0.0.1 1234

On the remote machine:

# nc -l -p 1234 | tar xvfpz -

Lets examine why this isn't such a good way to do it and lets examine some better options.

I ran across this software several months ago while looking for some other graphics software for Linux. Initially, I wasn't too interested in it....but I still installed it anyways figuring I would have time to look at it more. Then, I remembered that I do web hosting and designs, so maybe I need to take a closer look at this software.

Basically, agave is a color compliment selector. It could be used any time you are trying to get complimentary colors, whether it be web site designs, painting a room or house, painting a motorcycle, putting together anything that deals with more than one color. If you have ever painted or designed a web site and later realized that the colors clashed....you will definitely benefit from using this software.

Here is a screenshot of the program before I get into installation and usage:

If you are like me, I seldom watch television because I am:

1. always sitting at computer
2. never anything on that I like
3. don't have the good channels
4. channels I do get have crappy topics (I have over 100 worthless dishnet channels...except for the history and discovery channels)

(excuse me while I make a self note right here....remind me to find out why the latest version of firefox steals my cursor and activates search every damn time I click on the fckeditor toolbar......driving me crazy at 5:30 am after an all nighter on the puter)

I wanted to show you software that allows you to watch television using Linux, over the internet, with access to 3,408 channels. You can also search for channels, and a simple search for hack brought up many I have already subscribed to (actually over 100 channels, but the top 10 or so was more what I was looking for).

The Software

Miro (previously known as democracy)

Most Linux distributions probably have it in their package manager, so look there first. Unless it is a really old version there is no reason to not use the one provided by your distribution.

Screenshot - click image for larger image

Update:  Initially this article started as a review of using p7zip as a backup method.  However, what I found was that p7zip wasn't near as good as using the tried and true gzip and also bzip2 on the final compressed file size.  Therefore, I have to quickly rewrite most of this "dynamic" article.  Dynamic articles on the MLUG are works-in-progress....ala, my notes while I am doing something that I feel others will also find useful.  So, the article changes until it is done or complete.

This article talks about comparing the compression results of p7zip, gzip, and bzip2 for archival purposes.  The goal is to backup and compress large directories of data to obtain the smallest output file.

The reason behind it all:  I am getting ready to back up my hard drive, wipe the hard drive clean, re-partition and format it, and then reinstall my existing linux from backup onto my laptop into an encrypted filesystem.  Why, you might ask, are you doing this instead of just format and reinstall?

I have spent a lot of time compiling and optimizing my sabtoo laptop (It is a hybrid sabayon / gentoo installation. I just installed sabayon to get it up and running quickly and then spent the last year optimizing it for my needs.....except I forgot one small detail.  That detail was the encrypted file system.). Prior to using sabayon, I have used gentoo for the last 4 or 5 years. Once I find optimizations that work, I generally try to stick to them. One of the nice things about linux, I can back up every directory, except proc and dev, and then restore them to another system, hard drive partition, etc.  (With customized gentoo / sabayon installations though, you are generally limited to restoring to the same hardware types including cpu and video card.  Therefore, it is better to think of a highly customized sabayon or gentoo linux as a "profiled system".  Most of the files I am backing up will really on work on this system! )

If you want to see how the hard drive is currently partitioned, take a look at http://www.edwiget.name at the triple boot article.

So, why am I choosing p7zip, gzip, and bzip2 for compression? p7zip is a very common compression format used a lot by Windows users, there is also a Linux version of it, and I am always trying to figure out a way to optimize large server backups....which includes higher compression for smaller files.  Gzip and bzip2 are pretty much standard compression utilities on Linux and are included with practically every linux distribution and installed by default.

AcetoneISO is the disk image emulator that mounts images of DVD and CD media. Both Mac OS X and Linux / other UNIX like oses can mount and use ISO images using loopback device. It is a DAEMON Tools (Microsoft Windows disk image) clone / emulator program with a lot more features.

Website: http://www.acetoneiso.netsons.org

fuseiso is a FUSE module to mount ISO filesystem images (.iso files, .bin files, .nrg files..). It is also used by some other programs too. It requires you to have fuse support in your running kernel. FUSE is fully functional file systems in a user space program. The easiest way to tell if you have fuse is to see if you have /dev/fuse. If so, you are good to go to use the fuseiso module. If not, you need to make sure your kernel supports fuse and recompile for it.