Open CinePaint Volunteer Positions

CinePaint Embedded Perl Integrator

CinePaint is popular advanced image editing software used by pro photographers and studio visual effects artists.

Are you interested in learning how to embed Perl in a GUI app? A great project for someone who wants to play with Perl and graphics. This project is to port the Perl plug-in from GIMP to CinePaint. Although superficially similar, CinePaint has a more powerful graphics engine that enables it to handle high fidelity image files (such as OpenEXR files output from Blender). GIMP plug-ins usually port easily to CinePaint because the API is similar. Minor C coding (switch/case) is needed to handle interfacing 16-bit and 32-bit color channels. An easy Perl embedding project that doesn't present a high bar. Some knowledge or interest in learning C, Perl, and autotools needed.

CinePaint Mac GTK+ Port Developer

Are you interested in having Linux GTK+ GUI code build natively on Mac OS X without X11? CinePaint has a native Mac port of GTK+ that's made a lot of progress. It works well enough to support simple apps, but not CinePaint yet. Our Mac developer resigned to join Apple. A great project for someone who wants to play with xcode and create ports of popular Linux apps on Mac OS X. Knowledge or desire to master Mac-native GUI API necessary.

CinePaint Macintosh Package Maintainer

CinePaint is popular advanced image editing software used by pro photographers and studio visual effects artists. Are you interested in learning how to build UNIX-based code on Mac OS X? A great project for someone who wants to play with xcode and master the basics of package management on Mac OS X.

FOSDEM Slides and Other News

Robin Rowe and Gabrielle Pantera spoke to an audience of 500 open source users at FOSDEM in Brussels on February 23rd, 2008 [article] [slides].

Aedan Kelly has Debian CinePaint GTK2 packages available for testing.

Sudirikku Mohanjith is working on 'make rpm' amd other RPM packaging.

CinePaint listed at TIG Colorist.

CinePaint home page and screenshots pages updated, links and about pages added.

CinePaint and Debian

An update on our Debian situation.

- CinePaint removed from Debian testing because Debian has dropped GTK1.

- Thanks to Kai-Uwe Behrmann, CinePaint supports GTK2 now.

- CinePaint's Debian maintainer retired. Nobody to upload GTK2 CinePaint.

- Thanasis Kinias, who's posted CinePaint bug reports since 2006, has objected to Debian about CinePaint being removed.

http://bugs.debian.org/437837#25
http://bugs.debian.org/437837#34

- Ongoing discussion at debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org

- Aedan Kelly may become the new maintainer. He's a maintainer for Sidux, a Debian-derived distro (http://sidux.com)

- Trying to find out what we need to do next.

What Is Libunistd?

Libunistd is a very thin POSIX wrapper created by Robin Rowe that enables building typical Linux code on Windows with VC++. Using libunistd, many Linux terminal-based apps will build on Windows as-is or with only minor changes.

Supported POSIX Calls...

Libunistd supports open/read/write/close, dlopen, opendir, gettimeofday, and the typical BSD socket calls accept/bind/connect/listen/select/socket. It also allows iostream.h and fstream.h to substitute for their non-dot-h counterparts in VC++.

Unsupported POSIX Calls...

The most notable omission is fork. Portable programs can be revised to handle POSIX threads (pthread) instead. A Windows pthreads port is available from Red Hat or there's a chopped down lite version I created in CinePaint CVS. Also missing is fancy signal handling. And, ioctls are obviously not portable.

How to Use...

To use libunistd simply #include <unistd.h> in your code and set your Windows build path to find it. You should not need any #ifdef WIN32 code in your app. The whole point of libunistd is to eliminate that junk.

You'll want to statically link to the (tiny) libunistd library. That has implementations of opendir and gettimeofday. You'll also need to link to Windows' Winsock library and possibly its Common Controls library. If you're running sockets from a Windows command-line app, there's a magic start-up function called StartWinsock() you'll need to call.

How It Works...

Many POSIX calls are available in Windows to support its implementation of BSD sockets, but have non-standard header names. There are many deliberately empty POSIX headers in libunistd so that Windows won't complain about missing Linux POSIX headers. Most of Windows POSIX implementation is in <winsock.h>, but you don't need to know that. Just include unistd.h and it will straighten out the Windows mess. Including unistd.h on Linux does no harm. That this file is standard on nix systems but not present on Windows is the trick to making code portable.

Alternatives...

Note that libunistd is deliberately a very thin implementation covering only the most basic POSIX calls that everyone uses. If you want a full-featured POSIX implementation and don't care how cumbersome it is, you're looking for Cygwin. If you're looking for a thin implementation of nix shell tools (ls, diff, du...) then you want CoreUtils for Windows, not Cygwin. With CoreUtils you can handle patching and other nix tasks in Windows using the standard nix command-line tools. By the way, if you're looking for a nice free Windows Perl you want PxPerl. A nice free Windows text editor that handles unix-style line feeds is Notepad++.

Cleaning up an image in 16-bit mode

Paul LeBlanc wrote to let me know about new forum he's working on that includes CinePaint:

http://www.smffree.com/forums/linuxgraphicsusers/index.php

There's a great little HOW-TO there for cleaning up an image in 16-bit mode.

New Debian CinePaint Maintainer

CinePaint needs a new Debian maintainer. Andrew Lau, who's been the Debian CinePaint maintainer for years, has moved on to other projects. CinePaint has been removed from Debian testing because Debian is dropping GTK1 support. Kai-Uwe Behrmann's GTK2 CinePaint needs to be packaged (configure --enable-gtk ) for Debian. Read the Debian CinePaint Discussion.

Do you want to be the new Debian CinePaint maintainer?

CinePaint Interviews

In this interview published today in the Linux Gazette, I talk about the upcoming FOSDEM conference, open source, Linux in Hollywood, and CinePaint.

Hollywood, Linux, and CinePaint at FOSDEM 2008

In this interview with Joel Cornuz at Linux Photography, Kai-Uwe Behrmann talks about photography, CinePaint and Kai-Uwe's views on CinePaint's future.

Linux Photography Interviews Kai-Uwe Behrmann

In this video interview with Rolf Steinort at Meet the Gimp, Joel Cornuz explains why he uses CinePaint, why 8 bits isn't enough.

Meet the Gimp Episode 028: Are 8 Bits Enough?

And, that's my cover story in the February issue of Linux Journal, about the making of Paramount's THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES. On newsstands everywhere.