Monthly Archive for January, 2007

On LGM

Published on January 27, 2007 in Graphics. 0 Comments

Libre Graphics Meeting was mentioned in the OSDL Desktop Linux Working Group’s first year-end report on the state of the overall desktop Linux ecosystem.

” Graphics development promises to continue to move forward via the collaboration of the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM), where free software graphics developers and artists exchange ideas and tips, and map out the future of free graphics. LGM brings together developers and users of the best known free software graphics applications, including GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, and Blender.”

The first LGM was definitely a success. Thanks to everyone involved to have made it happen and rock on this year :)

Exporting profiles

Published on January 23, 2007 in Graphics. 2 Comments

Reading Aaron’s posting on audio profiles in Banshee, I wonder over and over again, if we could have such profiles/presets in GIMP for exporting. I rarely see people using all of available export filters all the time, besides, users are still presented with extra dialogs with exporting options. So why not have a nice UI to save most often used options as profiles and use them in Save/Save As/Save As Copy dialogs?

My guess is that we would have to a) find out how it fits user scenarios developed during the meeting in November 2006 and b) find a volunteer developer, if this feature wasn’t considered as counterproductive.

Free!Music

Published on January 18, 2007 in Sound. 2 Comments

One of the projects I’be been involved into from the very beginning is Free!Music. It started in early 2002 from two ideas:

  1. There is something deeply wrong with the way record labels do their business and the way music is promoted.
  2. Why not have a CD of freely redistributable music as an addition to a Linux distribution?

The first idea came from EXIT project — a music band that doesn’t restrict itself to any particular music genre, playing a fusion of them, often doing jam sessions with musicians who play from jazz to folk to rock music. They were the first to release their tracks under terms of OpenMusic license that was further reevaluated and turned into Free!Music declaration.

The second idea came from ALT Linux — a russian Linux vendor who started as Mandrake and SuSE distributor, then soon quit that business and started it’s own apt-rpm based distribution, doing solutions based on it, being involved into russian e-government project etc.

We had some participants from ex-USSR countries before, but recently the project has become truly international. Yann Bennoist, guitar wizard of famous Space band, who did session work with Mireille Mathieu, Michel Legrand, Patricia Kaas and others has joined us and published four tracks under terms of Free!Music declaration:

Feel free to checkout them, read the interview with Yann and listen to other songs. Oh well, and we have Internet radio playing all published songs 24 hours/day :)

Nah, and for those socialized — we have a last.fm group :D