Utilizing your Linux system's native applications will let you perform many functions which are necessary for today's business users. Last month we reviewed a word processor suite, which is good for every day use. When creating other documents, such as brochures, a graphical program is useful for image manipulation. It is great to be able to make banners for your website or letterhead logos. Programs from Corel are often hundreds of dollars, while the program that comes in the major distributions, and can be downloaded from the web from http://www.gimp.org/ are freely distributed under the GNU Public license.
According to the creators of GIMP "The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring". The GIMP website "contains information about downloading, installing, using, and enhancing GIMP." The site also serves as a distribution point for the latest releases, patches, plugins, and scripts. They also try to provide as much information about the GIMP community and related projects as possible.
To start GIMP, you start by going to your bottom task bar and locating the program button. Unlike windows style which shows a long flat file of apps, under S.uS.E. Linux, programs are listed in a longer tree structure, thus its a little more difficult to locate programs. You find this application by clicking: SUSE, Everything, Multimedia, Graphics, GIMP. If you haven't used the program before it will prompt you to install the files into your working directory. Small windows tell you that your KDE/Linux manager/OS is making a directory: mkdir/home/users/glenn/gimp . It then installs all the fonts, plugins and other files needed to run the program.
The final note says: Installation successful. Hit finish and GIMP installs for you to begin to use it. You may need to add a file GIMPrc to your directory as well as ensure the color manager is set to use multiple colors in the program. (The X-message told me what to add that was missing, so it wasn't hard to figure out what the problem was). It's a bit tricky to set up, and I needed some help at this point. So again, the autorun feature which regular windows users are familiar with beats GIMP for ease of install. This is one of the reasons why these applications are not rapidly replacing what is already out there. When installer helper apps are written for Linux, usage should increase.
