Fedora Daily Package - Artsy Tuesday

Artsy Tuesday: grip -- CD Ripper GUI

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:01:00 -0500

Grip is a graphical front-end for cd-ripping and encoding tools such as cdparanoia, cdda2wav, and oggenc. It can auto-detect disc insertions, do database lookup of CD title and track information, encode one track while reading another, rip partial tracks, and more.

Installing from the command line: yum install grip
Installing using the graphical installer: Search for grip
Menu location after installation: Applications > Sound & Video > Grip
Command: /usr/bin/grip
Upstream website: http://www.nostatic.org/grip/

Artsy Tuesday: Hydrogen - Advanced Drum Machine

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:01:00 -0400

The Fedora community includes artists of all stripes, including (I'm told, but haven't yet heard) some great musicians. It figures that Fedora would have some good music tools.

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine. It has a Qt-based MDI-style interface, with mixer, song editor, pattern editor, drumkit manager, and instrument editor subwindows. Included drumkits (sample sets) include GeneralMIDI (emulating a Roland XV-5080) and Roland TR-808. Although I'm not a musician, the interface is straightforward enough that I was able to begin experimenting quickly, starting with the included demo files.

So whether your garage band drummer is on vacation, you've always wanted to express your rhythmic side (or you've just got to have have More Cowbell!), or you're looking for a serious drum machine, Hydrogen is worth a look.

Note: On my F8 system, I was unable to get Hydrogen to work with PulseAudio and had to stop the pulseaudio daemon (killall pulseaudio) before starting Hydrogen.

Installing from the command line: yum install hydrogen
Installing using the graphical installer: Not available in the Browse view; use the Search or List view to install hydrogen
Menu location after installation: Applications > Sound & Video > Hydrogen Drum Machine
Command: /usr/bin/hydrogen
Upstream website: http://www.hydrogen-music.org/

Artsy Tuesday: Cinepaint - High-color-depth Editor

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:01:00 -0400

The Gimp is a fine image editor -- as long as you don't need more than 8 bits per color channel. When your needs take you beyond 24 bits per pixel, you need Hollywood's image editor: CinePaint.

CinePaint superficially resembles an older version of the Gimp, in part because it was originally based on a fork and rewrite of the Gimp about a decade ago. However, a quick look at the "New Image" dialog makes the difference clear: image color precision options go up to 32-bit IEEE floating point. CinePaint also supports the LittleCMS color management system, high fidelity image formats such as DPX and OpenEXR, and a 16-bit per channel printing -- perfect for high-quality photo work.

Installing from the command line: yum install cinepaint
Installing using the graphical installer: Not available in the Browse view; use the List or Search view to install cinepaint
Menu location after installation: Applications > Graphics > CinePaint
Command: /usr/bin/cinepaint
Upstream website: http://www.cinepaint.org/

Artsy Tuesday: pavumeter - PulseAudio Volume Meter

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:01:00 -0400

Ever want a simple volume meter for your PulseAudio sinks (outputs)? If so, pavumeter is the program for you: it does exactly that one thing, with no controls, menus, or options to clutter the display.

Tip: If you have multiple sound cards, you can specify a sink number on the pavumeter command line.

Installing from the command line: yum install pavumeter
Installing using the graphical installer: Applications > Sound and Video > pavumeter
Menu location after installation: Applications > Sound & Video > PulseAudio Volume Meter (Capture) and Applications > Sound & Video > PulseAudio Volume Meter (Playback)
Command: /usr/bin/pavumeter
Upstream website: http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/pavumeter/

Artsy Tuesday: Gliv - OpenGL Image Viewer

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:20:09 -0500

Fedora seems to have more than its fair share of image viewers, each optimized for a particular application.

Gliv is an image viewer that uses OpenGL to accelerate rotating, panning, and zooming operations and to provide very smooth fade transitions between images. It's a great tool for quickly putting together a nice-looking slideshow.

Installing from the command line: yum install gliv
Installing using the graphical installer: Not available in Browser view; use the List or Search view to install gliv
Menu location after installation: Applications > Graphics > Gliv Image Viewer
Command: /usr/bin/gliv
Upstream website: http://guichaz.free.fr/gliv/

Artsy Tuesday: Autotrace - Convert bitmaps to Vector graphics

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:01:00 -0500

Vector graphics formats such as SVG are perfect for images that will be used at many different resolutions. Converting a bitmapped image such as a scan or a photograph to a vector image can be a tedious challenge; vector editors such as Inkscape provide autotrace tools to help automate this process.

An alternative tool is autotrace, which is a command-line utility that can accept a wide range of bitmap input formats and produce output in several vector formats including scalable vector graphics (svg), encapsulated Postscript (eps), portable data format (pdf), and Adobe Illustrator (ai) format.

The screenshot image today was processed using autotrace from small portion of a 30 megapixel bitmap graphic for which I lost the original vector file; the SVG output from autotrace is being displayed in Inkscape. The conversion command line is quite simple:

$ autotrace input.png -output-file output.svg

However, this is a nice, clean, low-colour input file; autotrace did not fare nearly as well on the Fedora Daily Package logo -- your mileage may vary considerably.

Installing from the command line: yum install autotrace
Installing using the graphical installer: Not available in the Browse view; use the Search or List views to install autotrace
Menu location after installation: Not applicable -- run from the command line
Command: /usr/bin/autotrace
Upstream website: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/

Artsy Tuesday: GraphicsMagick - Image Conversion, Manipulation, and Display

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:01:00 -0500

GraphicsMagick is a fork of the venerable ImageMagick package, and provides powerful and flexible image conversion, manipulation, and display capabilities. Unlike ImageMagick, which uses separate binaries for various operations (display, convert, animate, compare, and so forth), GraphicsMagick uses a unified binary named gm which is invoked with an operation as the first argument:

$ gm display ~/Pictures/image000.jpg

$ gm convert ~/Pictures/image000.jpg /tmp/sunset.png

Although GraphicsMagick provides capabilities similar to the Netpbm utilities, it can perform multiple image manipulation and format conversion operations using a single process as opposed to a multi-process pipeline. GraphicsMagick can also perform on-the-fly image generation, which makes it particularly useful for web scripts. The image processing features are also available through C, C++, and Perl interfaces (and other languages through extensions).

Installing from the command line: yum install GraphicsMagick
Installing using the graphical installer: not available in the Browse view; use the Search or List views to install GraphicsMagic
Menu location after installation: not available - run from the command line
Command: /usr/bin/gm
Upstream website: http://www.graphicsmagick.org/

Artsy Tuesday: PDFCube - Presentation Viewer

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:01:00 -0500

PDFCube is a tiny (35k) player for PDF presentations. It provides double-buffered page switching (PgUp/PgDown or space), zoom to the corners or center of a page (h,j,k,l,z), and a Compiz-style animated cube transition (c).

Since repeatedly viewing the cube transition on a large projection screen can be dizzying, the program's author recommends using it only for major topic transitions within a presentation. To accomodate this, you can pre-select the transitions which should be performed using the cube animation on the command line:

$ pdfcube presentation.pdf 5 12

This example would use the cube effect when transitioning from page 5 to 6 and from page 12 to 13, but use a straight jump transition for the other pages. When PDFCube is invoked in this way you can advance from page to page using the spacebar, and the correct transition will be selected for each page.

You can create PDF presentations for PDFCube using LaTeX-Beamer, Prosper, or OpenOffice Impress.

Installing from the command line: yum install pdfcube
Installing using the graphical installer: not available through the Browse view; use the Search or List views to install pdfcube
Menu location after installation: not available - run from the command line
Command: /usr/bin/pdfcube
Upstream website: http://code.100allora.it/pdfcube

Artsy Tuesday: gimp-resynthesizer - Texture synthesis for the Gimp

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:01:00 -0500

Gimp-resynthesizer is a texture synthesis plugin for the Gimp. It can be used to create additional quantities of a texture, make a tileable texture, or remove objects from an image.

Once installed, gimp-resynthesizer provides some new entries in the Gimp menus:

Filter > Map > Resynthesize - can be used to create additional texture space or texture tiles
Script-Fu > Enhance > Smart enlarge, Smart remove selection, and Smart sharpen - scripts which use the resynthesize plugin

I found the Smart remove selection script a particularly useful timesaver, especially when the area surrounding the selection was of a consistent natural texture (such as leaves, branches, or gravel). Today's screenshot shows a picture of a chipmunk on gravel with the corner of a car included in the shot, and then with the car removed by Smart remove selection (with a bit of manual cloning to soften the transition). There's also a shot of some leaves converted into a tile for use as a desktop background.

This package does not include a manpage; for documentation, refer to the file /usr/share/doc/gimp-resynthesizer-0.15/README and the upstream website.

Installing from the command line: yum install gimp-resynthesizer
Installing using the graphical installer: Not available in browse mode; use the Search or List modes to install gimp-resynthesizer
Menu location after installation: Not on the application menu - access through the Gimp (Applications > Graphics > GNU Image Manipulation Program) then use the Gimp menu options mentioned above.
Command: /usr/bin/gimp
Upstream website: http://logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer

Artsy Tuesday: Hugin - Photo stitcher

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:01:00 -0400

Hugin is a GUI tool for stitching photos together. Although it works best with photos that are very carefully taken -- for example, by panning a camera on a tripod -- it does an admirable job even when given a group of photos shot from roughly the same position using a handheld camera.

The tab-based interface of this program walks you through the steps of creating a panorama photo: selecting the photos, specifying differences in the lenses, setting up control points (corresponding locations on pairs of photos), optimizing, and then stitching. At most steps in the process you can make fine manual adjustments or let the program work automatically.

Hugin is actually a graphical front-end to processing provided by libpano, a library from the Panorama Tools project originally created by Professor Helmut Dersch of the University of Applied Sciences Furtwangen. The Panorama Tools project is now maintained by a number of developers including five Google Summer of Code students who worked on some substantial improvements over the past few months -- so we can look forward to new capabilities in this software in the future.

Installing from the command line: yum install hugin
Installing using the graphical installer: Not available in browse mode; use the Search or List modes to install hugin
Menu location after installation: > Applications > Graphics > Hugin panorama creator
Command: /usr/bin/hugin
Upstream website: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/

Artsy Tuesday: Lilypond - Music engraving program

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:01:00 -0400

Lilypond is a music engraving program -- a "typesetter" for music. It accepts files written using a simple notation and produces PDF, PNG, Postscript, SVG, or TeX files, and can also produce MIDI files. It includes features for orchestral scores, variables, chords, lyrics, and more.

In addition to the Lilypond software, the Fedora repositories contain a lilypond-doc package with documentation and sample files. Once installed, the documentation is accessible at /usr/share/doc/lilypond-doc-2.10.13/index.html and provides a simple and clear explanation of the input notation and and some examples of the program's capabilities. Lillypad is invoked from the command line with the name of an input file, and by default produces MIDI, Postscript, and PDF output in a single pass:

$ lilypond wtk1-fugue2.ly
GNU LilyPond 2.10.20
Processing `wtk1-fugue2.ly'
Parsing...
Interpreting music... [8][16][24][31]
Preprocessing graphical objects...
Interpreting music...
MIDI output to `wtk1-fugue2.midi'...
Layout output to `wtk1-fugue2.ps'...
Converting to `wtk1-fugue2.pdf'...

Lilypond output looks very impressive (as shown in the image, generated from sample files included in the documentation package -- click for a PDF) and can be extensively tweaked in the input markup.

Installing from the command line: yum install lilypond lilypond-doc
Installing using the graphical installer: Applications > Authoring and Publishing > lilypond (install lilypond-doc using the Search or List modes)
Menu location after installation: None -- access from the command line
Command: /usr/bin/lilypond
Upstream website: http://lilypond.org/

Artsy Tuesday: KoverArtist - Quick disc case maker

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:01:00 -0400

KoverArtist is a tool for creating CD and DVD case art. Rather than provide unlimited artistic control, it's designed to let you put together a good-looking cover quickly: select the type of case, a couple of photos, placement options and text effects, the enter the text and hit print. You can put a CD in your drive and import title and track info from an online database with one click, and another click will launch a Google image search for pictures related to the disc title.

Installing from the command line: yum install koverartist
Installing using the graphical installer: Desktop Environments > KDE (K Desktop Environment> > koverartist
Menu location after installation: > Applications > Sound & Video > KoverArtist
Command: /usr/bin/koverartist
Upstream website: http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=38195

Artsy Tuesday: Gallery2 - Web photo gallery

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 00:01:00 -0400

Gallery2 is an easy-to-use web-based photo gallery, built on PHP, which has many available plugins and an active user community. Once installed, it's accessible at http://Hostname/gallery2/; the first time you access that page, you'll have to go through an 11-step setup process, which requires an SQL database (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL) installed somewhere on your LAN and access to a root shell prompt.

The Gallery2 setup process is unfortunately not compatible with SELinux, so you will need to either temporarily disable SELinux (setenforce 0) and then re-enable it after setup (setenforce 1), or adjust the security context of the /etc/gallery2/config.php file.

Many of the Gallery2 modules are available in the Fedora repositories; to see the list, search for gallery2 in the Package Manager's Search tab, or enter the command yum list 'gallery2-*'. These modules may also be installed through the Gallery2 admin interface, but doing so will require that you change the permission of a couple of directories and adjust or disable SELinux -- so I recommend installing the modules using the Fedora package management tools.

Installing from the command line: yum install gallery2
Installing using the graphical installer: Development > Web Development > gallery2
Menu location after installation: Not applicable -- access through a web browser at http://Hostname/gallery2
Command: Not applicable
Upstream website: http://gallery.menalto.com/

Artsy Tuesday: RenRot -- Rename and rotate photos

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:01:00 -0400

RenRot is a simple but very useful command-line tool. It renames photo files based on information in the EXIF tags within the photo file. By default, it will rename each photo to the year, month, day, hour, minute, and second that it was taken. It will also rotate images based on the orientation data in the EXIF tags, if present (this requires a camera with a mercury switch or other orientation-sensing mechanism).

You can use the -n option to specify a naming template using a syntax similar to that used by the date command -- so you could rename files to the format YYYY-MM-DD-c-Iiii.jpg, where YYYY is the year, MM is the month, DD is the day, cc is a sequence (counter) number, and iii is the ISO sensitivity, using this command:

$ renrot -n "%Y-%m-%d-%c-%I.jpg" *.jpg

RenRot offers a number of other features, including aggregation (grouping into directories by moving files or creating symlinks), which can be performed according to gaps between image groups, the date on which each photo was taken, or custom criteria. RenRot can also add (or change) EXIF tags to store information such as comments about the photos. The well-written manpage for the program (man renrot) has all of the details.

Installing from the command line: yum install renrot
Installing using the graphical installer: Applications > Graphics > renrot
Menu location after installation: (none)
Command: /usr/bin/renrot
Upstream website: http://freshmeat.net/projects/renrot/

Artsy Tuesday: Gscan2pdf - Frontend for scanning utilities

nospam@example.com (Chris Tyler) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:01:00 -0400

Some time ago the unpaper package was featured. It's a powerful tool for cleaning up scanned images -- but it's a command-line tool.

Gscan2pdf is a one-stop GUI tool for the production of high-quality PDFs from scanned images, providing a graphical front end for xscanimage, unpaper, gocr or tesseract, and other tools. Cleaned-up scanned images are presented in one pane, and OCR text in another. Images may be saved in PDF, Jpeg, Tiff, or PNG formats.

Although Gscan2pdf does not permit you to adjust configuration options and view their effects without re-scanning the source image, once it is properly configured for a particular input document it enables a very efficient scanning workflow.

Installing from the command line: yum install gscan2pdf
Installing using the graphical installer: Not available on the Browse tab -- use the Search or List tab to install gscan2pdf
Menu location after installation: Applications > Graphics > gscan2pdf
Command: /usr/bin/gscan2pdf
Upstream website: http://gscan2pdf.sourceforge.net/