XFree86/2 - Gimp/2 1.1.8

Platon Fomichev

GIMP 1.1.8 - the Phantom Horror

It's a Gimp - It's a Horror - that's the first thing you will see when you will launch the latest creation of GIMP/2 team - one of the most powerful image processing applications now available for OS/2. This thing explains rather simple - GIMP is still in development, so now decent splash screen was made yet :) I will describe new version of GIMP in brief and you will make the decision, whether to install it or not. Please note that 1.1.8 is the latest and the last one in development series and stable version 1.2.0 will appear only after 2 or 3 months.

System Requirements

  1. OS/2 Warp 3 (Fix 17 and higher) or OS/2 Warp 4 (Fix 5 and higher), sadly OS/2 Warp Server for E-Business will not be able to run GIMP as XFree86/2 traps it.
  2. XFree86/2 with accelerated XServer, here I mean good video card which can do 16bit and 24bit and have its own XServer, not common SVGA server, please note that Matrox and some other cards use SVGA server and yet they use most of acceleration from their cards.
  3. 48 or 64 Mb of Ram if you want to fly not to crawl.

What to download

  1. GIMP/2 1.1.8 itself:
    gimp118.txt
    gimpb118.zip
    gimpd118.zip
  2. GTK 1.2.2 or GTK 1.2.3. You may consider downloading GTK 1.2.2, if you want to get the latest version install GTK 1.2.3
    gtk 1.2.2 (gtk122.zip)
    glib 1.2.2 (glib122.zip)
    		 gtk 1.2.3 (gtk123.zip)
    glib 1.2.3 (glib123.zip)
  3. XServer (link) with correct shared memory handling: you will need to download it from Taiwan, I recommend you will download XServer with built-in True Type support, so you may use TTF fonts later in GIMP (r350.ee.ntu.edu.tw/~hcchu/os2/).
  4. Latest shared memory libs:
    shm.zip
  5. Some other libs, here they are:
    jpeg6b.zip
    tiff34.zip
    mpeg121.zip
    gettext.zip

How to install

The installation is quite simple, just unpack GIMP to your XFree86 tree and you are done, in GIMP there is no installation script like in 1.0.2, but this is temporary thing. GIMP 1.1.8 is a brand new application so it can coexist with GIMP 1.0.2 on your machine without any problems. To speedup GIMP please overwrite gdk12.dll with gdk12.dll.xshm, you may find both in /XFree86/lib/ .If you are not going to program for X11, you can safely delete all *.a and *.lib files.

How to run

  1. set EMXOPT=-h512
  2. gimp118 or if you have troubles (pretty strange): gimp118 --no-xshm --no-shm

What's inside

GIMP 1.1.8 has an extremely huge list of new things inside, more it is much fast than GIMP 1.0.2, you will feel this pretty soon. Although GIMP/2 1.1.8 still can not be compared to Linux version in speed this is only due to rather weak handling of floating point in EMX . We recompiled some plugins with Pentium Optimised compiler and also reached top performance. Hehhh - if only we can recompile GIMP using Visual Age C++ 4.0 :) Also GIMP/2 1.1.8 has an extremely powerful plug-in called Gimpressionist which is not distributed in base of GIMP 1.1.8. Here (algol.prosalg.no/~vidar/gimpressionist/) you will get more info about Gimpressionist. Users of GIMP 1.0.2 can get the new version of this plugin from here (gimpressionist-0.99.3b_os2.zip)

New features of GIMP 1.1.8:

After some thoughts I dropped all the list. You may look at it on sven.gimp.org/1.1/features.html - all features described there are valid for OS/2 version except that damned Windoze stuff :)

GTK engines are now supported! Make Gimp look like an application from other Operating System, make it alien, make it fantastic! Please visit gtk.themes.org and download theme which you want to use. Then download gtk-engines. Next you will need to figure out how to add themes to your gtkrc config file. This is quite simple, you will need to unpack theme, if you do not know how to handle .tar.gz files, just download this file (untgz095.zip) and use it to unpack all that *nix tar and gzip stuff. Next if you are interested in themes please figure how to add themes yourself :) I am doing such bad thing because I feel that OS/2 users must do something themselves, not act like sheep Windows users. If you have success and I am sure you will have it please write an article about "How to do it", thus sharing info with other OS/2 users. Please note that Gtk-engines use also a huge amount of memory - you will need 64 Mb of memory for sure to have GIMP flying.

GNOME/2 Team conclusion

Although GIMP 1.1.8 has a number of bugs, it is extremely worth seeing. GIMP again sets new standards of image processing in *nix operating systems. OS/2 version is a state of art port, it is clean and almost bug-free. In fact we discovered only 2 OS/2 related bugs, so small that they are not worth mentioning. However GIMP 1.1.8 have some not OS/2 specific bugs. It may crash suddenly or do other bad things. Some Script-Fu things are not working, tool option windows can crash GIMP if you will select different tools with open tools window. ANYWAY HAPPY GIMPING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Screenshots and some other things.

Of course we can not leave you without screen shots. All them are taken from GNOME/2 team member personal home computer.

Here is a desktop with GIMP 1.1.8 running with BeOS gtk theme. You can also see Enlightenment/2 with BeOS theme, GMC/2, Electric Eyes/2 and GNOME-Terminal (gimp118-1.jpg, 293k, 1280x1024 picture).

GIMP 1.1.8 dialogs

If you are interested in getting Beta version of GMC/2 and testing it please mail me: pla@cland.ru

P.S. I think it will be right to mail GIMP/2 team coordinator Asbjoern Pettersen (ape@spacetec.no) a letter with a huge "Thank You" for his work.