MESSAGE
| DATE | 2009-03-04 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] GNU/Linux Art Programs
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Linux.com
Everything Linux and Open Source
Switching art students to GNU/Linux
March 22, 2006 (8:00:00 AM) - 2 years, 11 months ago
By: Gurdy Leete
I'm an art professor, and last semester I embarked on an exciting new
adventure by erasing Mac OS X from nearly all of the Macintoshes in our
digital media lab and installing Ubuntu in its place.
I began seriously planning this change last school year, when I realized
how fully the current feature sets of free software programs could
satisfy the technical needs of the students in my classes. I decided
that the time had come to teach our undergraduate art students about
free software programs such as the GIMP, Scribus, and Quanta Plus,
instead of proprietary programs such as Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and
Dreamweaver.
Choosing the distribution and applications
My first step was to choose a GNU/Linux distribution. I needed something
that would work well with a classroom full of students subjecting it to
daily real-world challenges.
I found Penguinppc.org's list of distributions for the PowerPC
architecture a useful starting point. After a little research I chose
Ubuntu, because I found it easy to install and update on my computers at
home, and because it came with a large community of Ubuntu PowerPC users
who could offer support on the Ubuntu online discussion forums.
The next step was to determine which applications I'd use. For digital
painting and image editing tools to replace Photoshop and Painter, the
GIMP was the obvious choice. Krita is gaining some interesting painting
capabilities, and next year I think I'll teach that too.
For a vector graphics design program to replace FreeHand, the choices
included Skencil, Inkscape, Sodipodi, and OpenOffice.org's Draw. I chose
Inkscape because I especially liked its user interface and features such
as Tile Clones. As a side benefit, Inkscape's Help menu offers tutorials
that are concise, useful, and inspiring.
For a page layout program to substitute for QuarkXpress, I considered
Scribus and Passepartout. Scribus seemed to be in a much more mature
stage of development, so it seemed to be the better choice. At the time
I overlooked Cenon, and I haven't investigated it much since, but
Scribus has worked well.
To replace Dreamweaver, I reviewed Bluefish, Nvu, and Screem, but I
chose Quanta Plus because I liked its user interface and its project
management features.
For designing typefaces in place of programs such as Fontographer or
FontLab Studio, FontForge seemed to be the only available choice. It's a
terrific tool which was inspired by Fontographer.
The students' reactions
The students' reactions to all this was inspiring. They felt empowered
by the quality of the software and their ability to upgrade, share, and
customize it freely. They also appreciated the immense array of
additional GNU/Linux multimedia software available to them. And I found
it inspiring how many of the students took enthusiastic advantage of
other applications, not only by installing software via Synaptic from
the Ubuntu repositories of more than 16,000 packages, but in some case
by compiling source code from elsewhere.
Near the beginning of each course, I designated a session for an
Installfest, and was pleased to see how many students brought in their
computers to install free software. I also ordered dozens of free Ubuntu
disks from shipit.ubuntu.com for the students to give to their friends,
and was happy to see how quickly they disappeared. Beginning students
found it helpful to have the software at no cost on their personal
computers, so they could easily access it after class. Advanced students
felt that the move to free software gave them new capabilities and more
freedom.
When students asked if they were learning the industry standard
applications that they felt they might need to get a job, I pointed out
that in our department fourth-year students spend a semester developing
their portfolios using the technologies of their choice, and that once
they've learned the free software packages, gaining expertise with their
proprietary counterparts won't be difficult in their semester of
portfolio development, if they wish. The first group of my "switched to
GNU/Linux" students starts their semester of portfolio development now,
and I expect they'll do extremely well.
I found that Photoshop and the other proprietary software packages we
had been using for years generally had more polished interfaces and more
advanced features than the free software we chose. But the free software
had more than enough of the core capabilities we needed in my classes,
and also often featured desirable capabilities missing in the
proprietary software.
The switch saved thousands of dollars in software upgrades. As a result
I was able to dramatically lower the lab fee for each class, and require
instead that the students purchase additional textbooks. These textbooks
enriched the class experience, yet the overall cost to each student was
significantly less, which they appreciated.
Technical challenges
We faced a few technical challenges, but I was relieved that we were
able to find solutions and workarounds to them all easily. The technical
support we received on the Ubuntu forums was great.
Installing the software was easy, using the Ubuntu installer and
Ubuntu's Synaptic package manager. Connecting each computer to the
campus network was also easy, using the GNOME Network Settings tool.
I wondered what I would use to replace AppleTalk for sharing files
between computers, and briefly wondered if I should try to get AppleTalk
running under Ubuntu, but then realized that FTP or SSH would work fine.
Using Synaptic it was easy to install Konqueror along with the OpenSSH
client and server. Konqueror served as a nice GUI for file transfer via
SSH, simply by typing in fish:// and the network address in Konqueror's
Location field.
During the first few weeks of class the network connection on some
computers would sometimes inexplicably die. We worked around this by
deactivating the computer's Ethernet connection in the Network Settings
window, closing the window, and then reopening the window and
reactivating the connection, but it was annoying. Then the Breezy Badger
edition of Ubuntu was released, which we easily installed over a weekend
after first backing up the student's data directories. At the same time,
someone suggested that we turn our classroom's hub off and then on to
restart it, in case the hub was locking up. I'm not sure which action
was the cure, but after that we never had a network problem again.
At first, the CD/DVD eject button on the Mac keyboards didn't work, and
instead we had to use other methods to eject a CD or DVD, but that
inconvenience also disappeared when we installed Breezy Badger.
To get our old Wacom tablets to work in the GIMP, we had to manually
edit each computer's xorg.conf file and then change the settings in the
GIMP's "Configure Extended Input" dialog box after choosing
File->Preferences->Input Devices, but that task was fairly well
documented on the Ubuntu forums. After that, the graphics tablets worked
beautifully, and my students enjoyed the good support for
pressure-sensitivity.
Checking the USB Scanners on Linux list, I found that our scanner wasn't
supported. I had left Mac OS X on a spare computer, so we simply left
our scanner hooked up to that computer, scanned all our images there,
and then transferred the files via FTP. We can buy a good new scanner
for under $100, so next year we'll buy a scanner that's both Linux and
Mac OS X compatible.
By checking www.linuxprinting.org we found our USB inkjet printers were
well-supported by Linux drivers. We hooked them up to the USB port of
any computer from which we wanted to print, and generally they worked
without any problems.
Our monochrome and color laser printers connect to our network via
AppleTalk, so to print from them, we transferred our files to our Mac OS
X computer and printed from there. Next year, I'll research a method of
connecting them directly to our Ubuntu computers, but this approach
worked fine.
Future plans and recommendations
The switch to free software has been a big success here in the
Department of Art and Design at Maharishi University of Management in
Fairfield, Iowa. This semester I plan to take the switch further in my
video classes by replacing Avid DV Express, Final Cut Express HD,
Soundtrack, and iDVD with Kino, Cinelerra, Rosegarden, and DVDstyler.
Next year, I plan to replace Maya with Blender, and perhaps substitute
some combination of Synfig, OpenLaszlo, or Ktoon for Flash.
If you're contemplating a similar switch, I encourage you to move ahead.
Think about which distribution best matches your needs, and select your
applications carefully.
If you need to share the computers with classes that aren't using
GNU/Linux, you can undoubtedly install GNU/Linux on your computers in a
dual-boot configuration with Windows or Mac OS X. With Ubuntu on the Mac
I found that to be easy.
Read in the original layout at: http://www.linux.com/feature/52758
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