A new Bordeaux implementation of Wine will install IrfanView AND IrfanView plugins
One of the hiccups in Bordeaux, a for-profit, costs-$20 implementation of Wine that allows for easy installation of a variety of Windows applications in Unix/Linux environments, is that while installing the IrfanView image editor is clickably easy, users are on their own when it comes to the IrfanView plugins.
In my workflow, the IrfanView plugins are an essential part of the IrfanView experience. That's a fancy way of saying I need the plugins.
I managed to get those plugins installed the last time I installed Bordeaux (and for the record, I'm a paying customer), and along with some incompatibility between the newer Wine base supplied by Bordeaux and the older environment of Debian Lenny, the experience wasn't as smooth as it should be.
In distributions built with newer packages, such as Ubuntu, the Wine supplied with Bordeaux should work well (in Debian all I had to do was use the distro's own, older Wine and all began working).
And with support for easy installation of the IrfanView plugins, Bordeaux should make the installation of Windows applications under Wine even easier than before.
I don't have Wine or Bordeaux running on my relatively new Ubuntu Lucid installation, and with improvements in gThumb I need IrfanView less and less, but I'm thinking about giving Wine/Bordeaux another test anyway ... I'm just not quite there yet.
Thanks to FreeBSD - The Unknown Giant for the link, which reminds me to say that Wine and Bordeaux are available not just for Linux but also for FreeBSD/PC-BSD and Solaris.
Many people have commented both here and elsewhere that you don't need to spend $20 on Bordeaux and that it's easy enough to install Wine and Winetrick s and spend nothing on a Wine implementation. That may be true (though I find pure, unadulterated Wine a bit of a mystery), but Bordeaux does make installing its core list of supported applications extremely easy. That's worth $20 to me. Not necessarily $40, $60 or more — but $20 for sure.
And since that's what Bordeaux is asking, I'm surprisingly OK with it.
2 Comments
Leave a comment
About this blog
Why are you talking about using WINE to run proprietary IrfanView? You should only recommend a Free Software alternative instead, gThumb is good in that area. It can perform many image manipulations, play videos, and even upload images to online services from within gThumb.
Fotoxx is even better for image manipulations. I would have liked the article more if WINE wasn't mentioned and Free Software alternatives were mentioned more.
I've never heard of fotoxx before, but I've just found the website - http://kornelix.squarespace.com/fotoxx - and I'm anxious to try it.
I'm also a huge fan and heavy user of gThumb, and version 2.11 addresses one of the last remaining issues I had in my particular workflow vs. Irfanview, which is manipulation of the IPTC data in JPEGs.
I wish I could use the GIMP for all of my photo editing, but like almost all Linux/Unix photo-editing applications, it erases this data when saving the image.
Only digiKam, which I'm not terribly fond of, Gthumb and another app whose name escapes me (and which I also didn't like enough to continue using) can properly handle IPTC data in JPEGs, which is where just about every photojournalist and photo editor embeds caption and credit information.
The one thing I'm still missing in gThumb is sharpening of images. digiKam does sharpening, but it makes it extremely complicated, and I've never gotten good results from its sharpening feature, so I stick with gThumb and just don't sharpen images. And in gThumb 2.10, the version in Ubuntu Lucid, I don't have all of the control over IPTC that I can get in 2.11 (which appeared in Lucid briefly before it was downgraded by the Ubuntu developers).
Irfanview pretty much does the job I need it to do. It also does batch operations, which gThumb can't do. I used to have that Phatch batch processor installed in Ubuntu, but I never used it much. I really should look into how Phatch works, because it could be the missing piece in my image-processing puzzle.
I really don't care which office suite I'm using - I barely need one anymore. I plan to start editing video soon, and I'm not exactly taken with the choices available in Linux.
For text editing I really like Gedit when I'm in GNOME, but it doesn't allow for easy changing of the case of text from the keyboard, so I find myself using Geany for that particular feature alone. I hate to say it, but the Windows app Notepad++ does a great job as a text editor, and I don't run Geany on the Windows side because it just doesn't work as well as Notepad++. Notepad++ is GPL, even though it's a Windows app.
Irfanview is a great application. For the past few months I have been using gThumb on my Linux machine and haven't had Wine installed at all (though I will be going back to Wine soon). but I continue to use Irfanview in Windows and recommend it to anybody who has to work with images. For my purposes it's better than Photoshop.
So to deny others that application, even though it's free as in beer but not free as in freedom is not something I'm comfortable with.
I'd love for the absolute best lightweight image editor to be a Linux application.
If the Linux community stopped paying so much attention to F-Spot and Shotwell, which in my opinion are nowhere near as useful or functional as gThumb, and put more energy into gThumb itself, we'd be in a much better place.
As it is, the pace of development for gThumb has picked up, and I hope it gets better and better in the coming months.
I will give Fotoxx a try and give Phatch another go.
Thanks for your input.