GIMP in 2012

  By Articles, FLOSS, Imaging, OSS

As 2013 is fast approaching, we’d like to take a quick look at 2012 and what we did during the year.

In May we released the long anticipated new stable version, v2.8, with many improvements such as layer groups, tagging of resources, new Cage transform tool and more.

We also started the final transition to GEGL as a new image processing core. All legacy from the libgimp has already been removed.

Unstable version of GIMP is now capable of working in 16 and 32 bit per channel modes, both integer and float. Color management has been improved as well, and thanks to support by AMD and Google the GEGL library can do GPU-side rendering and processing with OpenCL.

We successfully participated at Google Summer of Code 2012. Our students ported more GIMP filters to GEGL operations, created a node compositing application for testing GEGL, and implemented a unified transform tool for GIMP.

In past years we let our work with community slip, so this year we also tried to establish a better connection with our user base. Our Google+ page, where we now regularly share project news and useful GIMP tutorials we come across, is currently circled by ca. 22.000 people (as compared to 1.000 in January 2012).

Last, but not least, we are happy to see the community actively promoting GIMP of its own accord. E.g. this year the GIMP Magazine project was started, with two issues already published and the 3rd issue currently in the works.

Thanks to all contributors our project vision is becoming a reality. GIMP already works in HDR, partially uses GPU for rendering and processing, has better transformation tools.

Our primary focus for 2013 will be finishing the transition to GEGL. We don’t expect it to be an easy job: it’s likely to keep us busy most of 2013, if not longer. You can help us to boost the development. Come join us to complete the rewrite and deliver the new generation of GIMP as a polished stable product.

Samba 4 to hit the Enterprise with Active Directory Compliance.

  By Articles

Samba LogoAs the culmination of ten years’ work, the Samba Team has created the first compatible Free Software implementation of Microsoft’s ActiveDirectory protocols. Familiar to all network administrators, theActive Directory protocols are the heart of modern directory service implementations.

Samba 4.0 comprises an LDAP directory server, Heimdal Kerberos authentication server, a secure Dynamic DNS server, and implementations of all necessary remote procedure calls for ActiveDirectory. Samba 4.0 provides everything needed to serve as an ActiveDirectory Compatible Domain Controller for all versions of Microsoft Windows clients currently supported by Microsoft, including the recently released Windows 8.

 

 

Full article: https://www.samba.org/samba/news/releases/4.0.0.html

GraphBuilder: Revealing hidden structure within Big Data | Intel Labs

  By Articles

Big Data.  Big.  Data.  We hear the term frequently used to describe data of unusual size or generated at spectacular velocity, like the amount of social data that Facebook has amassed on us (30 PB in one cluster) or the rate at which sensors at the Large Hadron Collider collect information on subatomic particles (15 PB/year).  And it’s often deemed “unstructured or semi-structured” to describe its lack of apparent, well, structure.  What’s meant is that this data isn’t organized in a way that can directly answer questions, like a database can if you ask it how many widgets you sold last week.

GraphBuilder – A Scalable Graph Construction  Library for Apache™ Hadoop™

GraphBuilder: Revealing hidden structure within Big Data | Intel Labs.

 

 

Five out of six developers now using or deploying open source | ZDNet

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Five out of six developers recently surveyed by Forrester Research say they have used or are using open source tools as part of their application development or deployment and the top five classes of software used are operating systems, web servers, databases, developer tools and configuration management tools

Five out of six developers now using or deploying open source | ZDNet.

Open Source Survey for Malta

  By News

The Malta Information Technology Agency launched a Survey to evaluation the state of Open Source Software in Malta.  The Survey was launched during the Government of Malta Open Source End User Group meeting held at MITA in December.

The Survey is intended to any Maltese resident, business owner, students and workers, amonsgt others.  More information about Open Source Software, together with the Survey are available on the OSS section of the MITA Website at http://www.mita.gov.mt/oss

 

GIMP Gets ICC v4 Color Profiles Support

  By Articles, FLOSS, Imaging, OSS

For the last few weeks GIMP has been capable of using ICC v4 color profiles thanks to a patch by Laurent Martelli who ported the color management plug-in to use LittleCMS v2.

There is also an ongoing work by Elle Stone to adapt that plug-in to the new GEGL-based architecture and make color space conversions just work between various bit depth precision levels — from 8-bit to 32-bit floating point.

Once it’s done, GIMP will be capable of converting images between different color spaces with little to no loss of color fidelity. In fact, it already works, with some caveats.

Meanwhile Michael Natterer is busy porting plug-ins for loading and saving files to GEGL and GIO. The latter means that GIMP doesn’t create temporary files anymore when loading files from remote locations, and previews in the Open File dialog 100% match actual images.

There is still a lot of work to do before GEGL-based version of GIMP is completely functional. We encourage you to join the team and help making the future closer.