Adventures In Beta

Well, this isn't anything formal or special; it's just a collection of stuff I wrote up for my initial impressions.

A little trouble compiling, but not much (Linux 2.0.30, mutt Slackware system). I commented out the C++ comment in sinus.c when it barfed on it. All my libs for jpeg and tiff are in "normal" places so I didn't have the problem that many people seem to have with them.


I knew some people had trouble with old libraries not getting deleted. To avoid this entirely, I deleted all the libgtk*, libggimp*, libgdk*, and libglib* stuff in /usr/local/lib. Hope that does the trick...


Ugh. I did a "make install" and tried to run gimp. For some reason, libgimp didn't get installed? Weird. From the libgimp directory in the distribution, I did a "make install" and everything seemed to work after that...except...

I left my ~/.gimp directory in place. Woops. Tons of errors. "rm -rf ~/.gimp" did the trick. Time to run GIMP!

UPDATE Scott Goehring sent a patch to the mailing list that seemed to fix these problems without having to delete old libraries or ~/.gimp.


Woo hoo! I'm so pleased with the new toolbar...but that's not all...

Shrinkage isn't the only new and great thing. I love the new guides...to place a guide, click on a ruler along the top or edge and drag into the canvas; a blue dashed line will show up when you let go. To move it around, make sure you're using the Move tool.


Hmm...why don't my brushes show up? Woops. The gimp distribution doesn't come with brushes. I copied 'em over from /usr/local/share/gimp/0.99.9. Seems to work good! Cool.

Another quirk...I found myself wondering "How the hell do you create a new layer?" Stupid me...click the right mouse button on the layer's entry in the layers dialog...not on the preview picture, but in the label, for example. It brings up everything that used to be under the "Ops" menu in 0.99.9.

Yet another quirk...there's a buglet in gif.c. Someone forgot to comment out line 247: g_debug("fuck"). Comment it out, recompile the plugin, and reinstall it, and it fixes the problem.


Well, that's all for now...stay tuned for more writeups as things progress. If you think all this is overwhelming, you should probably wait for 1.0. If you're adventurous, hang in there, subscribe to gimp-devel, and roll with the patches. Happy GIMPing!

Zach