Recently in Epiphany Category

The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects).

But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager.

What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.

I have a few Web-delivered apps that absolutely require Firefox, but for as much else as possible, Epiphany does an excellent job and doesn't stress my less-than-new hardware as much as Firefox.

If you run top in a terminal and keep an eye on the running processes, you'll see that Firefox hogs a lot of CPU and tends to keep hogging it even if you're not "actively" browsing. Other browsers, including (in my experience) Epiphany, Opera, Chrome/Chromium, Konqueror, Midori, Kazehakaze (and really just about anything that isn't Firefox) is much more forgiving of system resources than Firefox.

So it pays to shop around for browsers that do what you want yet don't stress your system so much.

Though it's not open-source, I do use Opera on my super-old systems, where it's light footprint makes even my 233 MHz system usable.

I've been pretty happy with Chromium in Ubuntu, and Chrome in Windows runs better now that I have 1 GB of RAM on the XP box (it didn't do so well with 512 MB).

But in GNOME, I've relied on Epiphany as my browser of choice for some time. I didn't find it slow when it was based on the Gecko engine, and now on Webkit it remains fast and functional.

The more I use GNOME, the more I gravitate toward the "GNOME apps," incluiding Epiphany, Evolution (which I've just started using with a couple IMAP mail accounts), the Empathy IM client, Rhythmbox, etc.

While I think the even-tighter integration of GNOME apps in the Ubuntu panel is theoretically a step in the right direction, I find that things are broken enough that the benefits of that integration aren't terrible available at present (but I hope they will be in future).

Note: In the past month or so, I've run GNOME in Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7.3 and Ubuntus 8.04 and 10.04.

The OMG!Ubuntu blog reports on the decision, however preliminary, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas to remove the GIMP image editor from the 10.04 Lucid LTS release of the wildly popular Linux distribution.

Read the well-wrought entry linked above for the drawn-out reasoning behind moving the "professional"-quality Photoshop killer GIMP from the Ubuntu base (it'll be available in the Ubuntu Software Center, or your other favorite package-management tool).

Those assembled seem to think that GIMP is not used enough and is not consumery enough. And that the F-Spot photo manager can do basic photo editing and is much better for the average user.

Oh, do I have bones — plural — to pick over this one. I still haven't made my decision on whether I'm for Mono (using the Microsoft-compatible open-source tools) apps or against them (and F-Spot, along with Tomboy notes and, if you've added it, the Banshee music player seem in my mind anyway to be the highest-profile Mono apps in the GNOME world).

All I can say is that with the geek-political climate these days, more Mono rather than the same or less will just give more users a reason to jump off of GNOME (and Ubuntu) in order to keep one's collective hands, if not clean, than at least Microsoft-free.

Again, I haven't made a personal decision about Mono as yet, but I'm far from happy with F-Spot.

And yes, I've been using it somewhat regularly. For my purposes, I'm not crazy about having to import images into F-Spot. digiKam can deal with images in any directory structure, and I'd like my photo-organizing program to do the same. I understand that F-Spot is more iPhoto-like in this aspect. I still don't like it. It's OK for my personal images, but I can't keep my businessy images separate. Everything's in one big pile in F-Spot, except when you dig into the actual directory structure the app creates. Yep, just like iPhoto.

In F-Spot I can add a caption in the "comments" area. Unfortunately that data does not come up in any other applications I use to edit or view photos. I can't edit the IPTC data that 100 percent of professional photojournalists use (and those are the guys whose images I handle day in and out).

F-Spot will sharpen and adjust the color of images. It will crop them. But it won't resize them. Huge, huge deal-breaker for my "professional" use of this application. (And why would I use something for my "home" images that won't do the job with my real work if I don't have to?)

Truth be told, I don't require all that Photoshop offers. On the PC I use IrfanView. And basically my "quest" for a Linux/Unix image viewing/editing program runs along the lines of "give me something that does what IrfanView can do."

Even the GIMP (and Krita, too, O fans of KDE) can't deal with the IPTC data in JPEG images, which I absolutely need.

The digiKam image manager in KDE, through the great Kipi Plugins, CAN deal with this data, and pretty well, too (although the limit on the length of the IPTC credit line is a bit grating and seemingly unnecessary).

So I've been using digiKam for the past few weeks somewhat regularly. (Truth be told, I tend to work in IrfanView on my Windows box at the office about 80 percent of the time when editing photos; it's the environment I know, and that does what I want it to do.)

digiKam is a bit unwieldly. Like many KDE apps, there are menus for days, along with choices to match. It resizes. Good. It sharpens (although the results aren't as good, seemingly, as in every other app that sharpens images; there are, again, lots of choices, and I barely understand — and can't get a great result — from them. digiKam can crop, but you can't enter the exact dimensions of your crop in pixels and then drag the box around to make the perfect crop like I do in IrfanView. Not a deal-breaker, but not good either.

And did I say digiKam is unwieldy. Why are there separate "edit" modes for the metadata and the image data?

I've had little ol' gThumb on this Ubuntu machine for awhile. And hearing that the UDS suggested and then rejected it as a "replacement" for either GIMP and/or F-Spot prompted me to try it out. Sure I had opened a few images, but I hadn't yet done any heavy lifting with gThumb.

It was time.

Gthumb, little ol' gThumb (that's what I'll call it for the purposes of this entry), does almost everything I need:

-- Deals with images in their current directory structure
-- Resizes images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Crops images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Can edit/add IPTC caption info (to the main caption area only) with the "comments" feature
-- Allows for easy save-as of images

The only thing gThumb doesn't seem to do (and I could be missing it, though I don't think I am) is sharpen images. I can live without that, especially if gThumb can create and won't destroy existing IPTC data in JPEGs.

(Note: Besides Krita and GIMP, my previous favorite light image editor for Linux, MtPaint, is also an IPTC-data-destroyer and therefore can't be used for my "real" work.)

So thanks UDS people, for mentioning gThumb. And if you're asking my advice, and I know for damn sure that you're not, keep the GIMP or don't. I'll install it anyway.

But look deep into your geeky, geeky hearts and find it within them to replace F-Spot with gThumb. Or at very least make gThumb part of the Ubuntu base, make it the default image-organizing app, and let the rest of the free, open-source software-using world discover this most worthy of applications that for the most part can free me from the purgatory of Windows-based photo editing applications for good.

(And while I'm on the well-trod soapbox, let me mention that I wrote this entire entry using the newish Webkit-based Epiphany Web browser, another lovely bit of GNOME that I liked in its Gecko days but like even more now.)

(And sorry [really] about all those parentheses, within which I'm thinking all too often these days.)

I laugh — LAUGH! — when a tech journalist writes something to the effect of, "for lightweight tasks such as Web browsing," when you know, and I know, that there ain't nothing light about using present-day Web browser on present-day Web pages filled with Javascript, Flash and enough CSS to fill a book.

I can edit images all day long in the GIMP and not tap out my CPU or RAM like I do when using Firefox to hit all the Web pages and software-as-a-service type sites (heavy, heavy Javascript) to get my work done.

And this is in Linux, specifically Ubuntu at present. I've run into the same problem in Windows. You start with Firefox or Internet Explorer, and before too long your machine is running like crap.

I spent a bit of time today running most of the browser I have on my Ubuntu 9.04 system, most of which are based on the Gecko engine (Firefox, Epiphany, Galeon), one of which is not (Opera).

And I kept track of how they use CPU resources and memory via the handy Htop utility (top works just as well but isn't nearly as pretty; and you know how I like pretty).

Firefox, no surprise hogs the most CPU on my 1.3 GHz Celeron system (with 1 GB RAM). It's often at 90 percent or more of CPU and rarely dips below 40 or 50 percent. The more pages and the more Javascript and Flash (that's a really killer), the worse it is.

I'm not going to talk so much about memory because with 1 GB, I'm fairly comfortable. With Firefox running, about 400-500 MB is in use; the other browser generally use 200-300 MB.

The other Gecko browsers — the GNOME-supplied Galeon and Epiphany — also spike up to 90 percent when "intensive" things are happening — new pages being loaded, scripts executing, but they quickly "settle" down to 20 percent of CPU and sometimes as little as 10 percent.

Not surprisingly, Opera fared better. The free yet proprietary browser can still use a lot of CPU (in the 90 percent range) during heavy operations. But the difference I see in Opera (I'm running version 10 for Linux and also recommend it for Windows and Macintosh) is that once that instance of heavy use is over, Opera is very quick to give up those CPU cycles and return to a very refreshing 3 to 10 percent of CPU.

However, once the Flash plugin is invoked, all bets are off and Opera is as doggy as anything. It's really Flash that does the damage ... but damage it is. Flash is just plain evil in a box, especially in Linux.

I haven't been as smitten with the Webkit engine, or more specifically the Google Chrome Web browser, as some. In Windows XP with 3 GHz of CPU and 512 MB of RAM, it starts out great but has quite a bit of trouble redrawing the screen in comparison to Firefox once I've been running it for awhile.

I'll certainly keep an eye on Webkit in Linux — Epiphany is supposed to be moving to that engine.

But what I'd like to say once again is that on today's Web, running a browser is quite an intensive operation that requires a whole lot of resources in order to cause as little relative pain as possible to your system — and your nerves.

And there's nothing light about it.

Coming up: One of the 63 dependencies involved in installing digiKam on my GNOME-based, previously KDE-free Ubuntu system is the Konqueror browser. I'll have to try that. And I just added the uber-minimal-GUI-browser Dillo. We'll see how that cuts said mustard.

Maybe you're curious about how The Self-Reliant Thin Client is doing.

Here's the uptime output:

steven@maxterm:~$ uptime
13:08:07 up 24 days, 21:15, 2 users, load average: 1.70, 1.32, 1.31

Yep, the VIA C3 Samuel (rated at 1 GHz but running in Linux at 500 MHz for some reason) based converted thin client, running Debian Etch from an 8 GB Compact Flash card, has been working continuously for about a month now (I did reboot a few times during this test for kernel updates).

It's still no speed demon but handles the GNOME desktop fairly well. I did add Fluxbox for testing purposes, and I also installed the lightweight Dillo Web browser, but I'm still relying on the Iceweasel (unbranded Firefox) and Epiphany (GNOME's Gecko build) browsers, plus OpenOffice 2.0 Writer (works surprisingly well, even with 256 MB of RAM and 500 MHz of CPU) and GNOME's GEdit text editor.

I even used CUPS (The Common Unix Printing System) to set up a printer the other day. Even though most systems include native printer-setup utilities (GNOME's is extremely primitive), I find it's both easier and more instructive to use CUPS directly via a Web browser. For those who have never done it, open a browser and go to the following URL to access the CUPS interface:

http://localhost:631

I usually click on Administration and go from there. If you're asked for a login, that login is generally root, with the password being root's password. I can't remember how this goes in Ubuntu, which doesn't let the users (even the main user) at the root password (if there even is such a password).

Ubuntu's root/sudo situation is another kettle of fish for another post, but for most of us, the key to CUPS is using the root login and password to add or modify printers.

I will close out this entry by praising Debian Etch for being so solid on this (and just about every other) platform.

Like most of you, I use Web browsers a lot. A whole lot. And my problems with screen refresh seem most acute when using the Iceweasel/Firefox browser.

I thought the problem with "ghosting" images on the screen only occurred in GNOME, but now I've seen problems in Xfce, too.

To test my theory, I started using Epiphany, the GNOME Web browser based on Mozilla's Gecko engine.

So far things are looking pretty good. I'll have to do this for a few more days before I determine whether or not Iceweasel hates my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

I'll leave the jury out on this for the moment and render a verdict in a day or so.

10 minutes later: Nope, it's not Iceweasel. I'm seeing funky stuff in Epiphany, too. And running xrefresh doesn't clear it up, nor does dragging the window off the screen and back again.