Fading Memories

I've updated the Krita klik package; the crash on choosing the filter paint tool is gone now, and it should work better on SuSE and other systems. This is probably only a temporary location since it's eating into my data traffic allotment faster than I thought. What I don't understand is why my adsl connection has unlimited data traffic, while the website at xs4all is capped to 5GB/month. No doubt there's a reason for that, but I don't get it.

Update

Again updated the package: it now includes a fix that makes drawing smoother and better. And soon Krita will be really klikkable!

Together with Kurt Pfeifle, I've been preparing a klik package of a reasonably recent version of Krita. It's yesterday morning's version, and we've already added stuff, fixed bugs and done cleanups -- but this is a version of Krita that includes CMYK support, 16-bit channel support for grayscale, rgb and cmyk, openEXR, zooming histograms (in case you want to have more than 256 bars in your histogram of a 16 bit/channel image), curves widget with histograms, separations and many, many other things that are not in the 1.4.1 release.

If you've installed the basic klik support as per Kurt's instructions, then you can simply download a precomposed klik image of Krita and double-click on the file from Konqueror to run it.

Note: this won't work on all distributions, notably not on Slackware or Fedora. The package was created on Kubuntu Breezy. It may crash on SuSE 10. Or not. If you download this, please, please, please tell me whether it works for you, and if not, give me the output of running it as follows in a shell:

./.zAppRun krita.cmg

(Or was that .zApprun -- no matter, tab-completion will help you here.). I need success stories and I need failure stories. Mail me at: boud@valdyas.org

Now, if Krita does work for you, please be a little careful: this is a development snapshot. Only work on copies of your original images (which is wise anyway, no matter which app you use). If there's something that doesn't work smoothly, doesn't fit your workflow, impedes your progress or misses so badly it makes it impossible to do your work: tell me. Mail me, catch me on #koffice, file a wish. I'm not a photographer, I'm not a designer, and I'm not much of an artist. I need you to tell me how you want to use a pixel image app.

Update:

Thirty-five downloads and three reports later, I can confirm that the klik package works on SuSE 10 RC1 X86_64 and on Gentoo, if you install libIlmImf yourself. Klik doesn't work on SuSE 9.1 at all. (I also saw that people are still downloading the old binary snapshots: I have removed them.)

Updated update:

The package works fine on Debian sid, too. Niko Sams reports that the paint with filters tool is broken at the moment; something that we might not have discovered for quite some time without this way of having people test packages. Also: the performance test plugin can crash Krita, too. That's known :-).

Mandriva,too.

Stefano Pagnotelli reports that the package works fine on Mandriva Linux release 2006.0!

Success on SuSE 9.3

Bruno Windels reports succes on SuSE 9.3. This Klik thing is like magic!

DNS problems with klik

Note that aketon.klik.de has problems. If you want to try this, try to do the following:

wget 134.169.172.48/client/install -O -|sh

To install the klik client that will make it possible to doubleclik on the krita image file. Or you could add 134.169.172.48 klik.atekon.de to your hosts file: that way it'll work as advertised.

I'm starting to feel better -- even did some gentle hacking, yesterday. I'm still as weak as rubber kitten stuffed to the gills with phtalates, though. But I'm regaining some sort of perspective. It feels like Akademy wasn't just a week, but months long to me. Memories are starting to come back.

Like the incredible helpfulness of the organizing team, who took me to the airport to fetch my delayed luggage, called cabs for us and who were in general great. The very nice woman of the kiosk near the hospital, who, when I asked her in my best Spanish for una cerveza, por favor, answered in English and told me she thought I deserved a cold beer. Nice woman. The family restaurants near the residence and the University, where we could just order everything on the first page of the menu and get a delicious assortment of dishes. The kids playing around until late. Gabriel, the waiter at the residence cafe, who could speak English, but refused to do so. I stymied him with my Greek, though! Guy with a definite sense of humour. Some very good talks -- and also a few that made me fall asleep. The small supermarket near the university, which was fun and friendly -- and the whopping great big 3+4 near the residence, which had an entire aisle devoted to sausage. Pity the only thing I wanted at the time was a little yoghurt. The airconditioning didn't do much harm to me; but I discovered that I'm almost completely dependent on having network if I expect there to be network. Deprivation makes me grumpy. Funny thing is, if I expect not to have network, then it's no problem.

I'm still sick; I bought a bunch of grapes on Wednesday -- I remember Eric Laffoon remaring how great they looked -- and in the course of the afternoon I started feeling queesy. I went to the residence, tried to eat some dinner, and then I found out I shouldn't have done that. Cue one very feverish Thursday, an incredibly bad Friday (what with getting up at four to catch my plane) and a bed-ridden Saturday. I'm up now, I'm going to try to eat something. A spoonful of yoghurt or something.

Anyway: if people wondered where I had disappeared to on Thursday, now they know.