eeePC – the photographer’s friend

Posted on December 4, 2007 by blogmywiki

gimp on a eee pcThe Asus eeePC is great for the photographer on the hoof – especially if your camera uses SD cards which you can just pop in the slot in the side. The default image viewers are okay but leave a bit to be desired if you want to do anything slightly unusual… I tried a couple of others such as Google’s Picassa and Digikam but they weren’t quite for me either… specifically I wanted to be able to crop images to a fixed aspect ratio for making wallpaper. I was pretty sure that The Gimp would do the trick – using it is easy for anyone familiar with Photoshop. I had a look at this interesting post on eeePC tools for photographers – worth noting that to install it I had to press ctrl-alt-T to get a terminal and then type
sudo apt-get update
(note ‘sudo’) and
sudo apt-get install gimp
to get the install to work. (Thanks to Eric for pointing out my error here, now corrected).
When running the Gimp for the first time (type ‘gimp’ at the command line) the install wizard buttons will be off the screen, so hold down the alt key and click and drag the window up to get at them. You can use this trick to make sense out of the crowded Gimp screen too!

This entry was posted in Asus eee PC, Linux, photography, Xandros. Bookmark the permalink.

12 Responses to eeePC – the photographer’s friend

  1. Jakob says:
    December 9, 2007 at 10:50 pm

    You should try GIMP 2.4. It has an improved full screen edit function and hide/show tool window (F11 and tab-key). I imagine it would be useful on the eee pc. Also, you can drag the tool option window, layer window and others into the same window to save screen space:

    http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-using-docks.html
    http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-concepts-docks.html

    You can also select the small icon theme.

  2. blogmywiki says:
    December 10, 2007 at 12:38 pm

    Thanks! I’ll check that out.

  3. Tim says:
    December 13, 2007 at 12:35 pm

    Typing sudo apt-update does something, but ‘sudo apt-get gimp’ says ‘E: invalid operation gimp’. Adding install just says that ‘gimp’ isn’t available (presumably from the eeepc.asus.com site).

    Could you post a link to the original article please?

    Thanks.

  4. blogmywiki says:
    December 13, 2007 at 1:12 pm

    Thanks Tim, maybe I added a Xandros repository somewhere along the line and forgot about it – will check that out and post back; pretty sure I never added any Debian ones ‘cos they can break Xandros and hence your eeePC if you’ve not changed the OS.
    Original post was here: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:addrawphotoediting?s=gimp

  5. blogmywiki says:
    December 13, 2007 at 7:15 pm

    and some info on adding Xandros repositories is here:
    http://wiki.eeeuser.com/addingxandrosrepos

  6. Eric says:
    December 26, 2007 at 9:36 pm

    It should be “sudo apt-get install gimp” not “sudo apt-get gimp.”

  7. blogmywiki says:
    December 27, 2007 at 7:00 pm

    Eek! You’re not wrong… will edit my post if that’s okay.

  8. Jess says:
    August 6, 2008 at 10:44 am

    Hm. I get an error:
    E: Package gimp has no installation candidate

    ??

  9. blogmywiki says:
    August 6, 2008 at 8:45 pm

    Sorry to hear that – alas I no longer have an eeePC (long story, don’t ask!) so I can’t really help any more…

  10. Jess says:
    August 10, 2008 at 9:12 am

    Damn. Oh well.

  11. tristian o'brien says:
    August 9, 2009 at 6:05 pm

    great info, i have an eeepc for archiving pictures from my Sony Alpha 350 alpha.

  12. Gimp Tutorials says:
    September 19, 2009 at 8:08 pm

    Thanks for this valuable post. I love gimp.

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