Recently in Mono Category

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've stayed fairly quiet on the controversy over Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET protocol and C# programming language that's been grabbing a greater share of the desktop in various Linux distributions in recent years and months.

Reading this article by a Samba developer on the Tux Deluxe blog on why Samba/SMB — itself an iteration of a Microsoft technology — is much easier to justify using than Mono, I know that I have quite a way to go before I completely understand the issue.

Briefly, Jeremy Allison says that an agreement between the Samba project and Microsoft allows all users to implement Samba without threat of legal action over patents.

But with Mono, a similar agreement only covers users of software distributed by Novell, which signed an infamous patent agreement with Microsoft awhile back. That means the rest of us are not so well-protected:

... my basic issue with the Microsoft Community Promise is that Miguel (de Icaza) doesn't have to depend on it like everyone else does. Miguel's employer, Novell, has a patent agreement with Microsoft that exempts Mono users from Microsoft patent aggression, so long as you get Mono from Novell. Miguel takes pains to point this out. This is not a level playing field, or software freedom for all. This is a preferred supplier trying to pretend there is no problem. Sure there isn't a problem, for them. If it isn't good enough for Miguel, why is it good enough for other developers?

Allison's contention is that while he can understand original Mono creator Miguel de Icaza's reasons for wanting to code GUI apps in C# rather than C or C++, Allison would rather that the open-source community turned to Java instead in its quest to build out the graphical environment. There is some talk about, at the time Mono was started, Java not being available under a free license, but Allison contends that it has more to do with potential or real rivalries among developers wishing to use Java or Mono/C++, as well as control over their respective projects.

Although I'm not a developer, this is a very real issue for me, and it should be for all who use Linux/Unix — and especially GNOME — on the desktop. Two of the biggest Linux distributions — Debian and the Debian-derived Ubuntu — are based on the GNOME desktop environment and seemingly have Mono apps taking a bigger chunk of the system with every release.

Right now, the most common Mono apps, many of which are in the default install in Ubuntu, are:

Tomboy notes
F-Spot photo manager
Banshee music player
Gnome Do "intelligent launcher"

For a longer list, look at this portion of the Wikipedia entry on Mono.

This is no easy issue to resolve. On the one hand, there are always apps that can do the same things that don't use Mono, although in the GNOME environment some such as the Rhythmbox music player aren't very active in terms of development.

There's always KDE, which uses the QT 4 toolkit that is under the GPL license as well as the C++ programming language.

Personally I've avoided KDE as a desktop environment because in the distributions I've tried, it's a great deal slower than GNOME (and Xfce). Despite that, KDE has many extremely compelling apps that include the music player Amarok, CD/DVD-creation program K3b, photo-organizer digiKam and photo/paint app Krita, not to mention the still-seemingly young but very promising Kdenlive video editor.

Still, there is that relative slowness in KDE — and my perceived trouble with the KOffice suite, which seemingly lost its way the past couple of years. Then there's a gaggle of text editors (Kate, KWrite, Kedit, Kile) that previously didn't thrill me but do merit another look. I'm using Gedit in GNOME as my main text editor, and while I'm happy with much of what I see, the lack of any easy way to change the case of letters from the keyboard has my eye wandering.

Do I give abandon GNOME and give KDE another try? Maybe with a multi-core CPU, modern graphics hardware, a few GB of RAM and disk space for days I wouldn't care so much, but now with a 1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB of RAM and an Intel graphics chip that Xorg has been waterboarding for a year or so, I have to pay attention to the potential strain on my system, and thus far GNOME has provided a very nice combination of features and resource load.

On the other hand, seeing Mono as the "Miguel de Icaza-who-works-for-Novell Show," keeping in mind that I know little about him and have never met him, doesn't give me a good feeling about how GNOME is tipping every more closely into becoming a Mono-powered world.

Getting down to the application level. I do have Tomboy notes installed on a couple of boxes. I haven't used it much; I tend to write my notes in regular ol' text files or in Google Docs.

I've been using Rhythmbox a bit and have thought about trying out Banshee (which might become the default Ubuntu music player) ... and I probably should.

F-Spot is the default photo manager in Ubuntu, and I do use it and generally like it. I tried Google's Picasa for a day and thought it more than a little clumsy (and I wasn't a big fan of it scouring my system for images without my "OK" on it). I've used digiKam in the past and found it quite similar to F-Spot, with the added bonus of digiKam being the only Linux application I've ever used that pays even the slightest attention to the IPTC tagging that just about 100 percent of professional photographers add to their JPEG images via Photoshop or other proprietary apps such as PhotoMechanic.

I deal with this embedded metadata in between dozens and hundreds of JPEGs on a daily basis, and this IPTC code, in case you didn't know, is not only uneditable in the GIMP, MtPaint and presumably other Linux/Unix image-editing software but is generally erased by these programs whenever an image is modified within them.

So basically I'm a whore who can be bought by the first FOSS app that allows me to fully edit the IPTC data in JPEGs. I'm showing a whole lot of leg, but it seems nobody either knows or cares. I'll load digiKam again and see how it's doing on IPTC; I don't need a photo archiving program to edit images for Web publication. And if it did the job (and I don't think it will), I'd gladly use Krita — or anything else. I'm thinking of WINE and IrfanView, the latter of which I use heavily in Windows, just to be able to do more work in a FOSS OS and be able to use Windows even less than I already do.

Back to the point. I've totally run off the rails on my investigation of Mono. I still don't know exactly what to think of it. I'll keep looking around at what others are saying. If you wish, leave a comment on this post (you can now sign in with AOL, Wordpress.com and Yahoo accounts in addition to the other ways, including signing up for a Movable Type account on our server; Typekey/Typepad is broken at present, and yes, I'm looking into it).