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Photoshop in Linux Thanks to Disney 812

Posted by CmdrTaco from the useful-hacks dept.
miladus writes "eWeek reports that Walt Disney's feature animation unit (along with 2 other unnamed studios) are using Adobe's Photoshop in Linux. They use the Wine emulator to run the software and the 3 studios 'not known as team players, all three agreed that a project that would benefit the entire open-source community while delivering a technology they needed--was worth their cooperation'."
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Photoshop in Linux Thanks to Disney More

Photoshop in Linux Thanks to Disney

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  • Also ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Arthaed ( 687979 ) <arthaed@@@hotmail...com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:12AM (#6615830) Homepage
    I just remembered reading this [linuxjournal.com] article in Linux Journal about Dreamworks running Photoshop via VMWare.

  • Haha! (Score:4, Funny)

    by mao che minh ( 611166 ) * on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:12AM (#6615836) Journal
    Take that SCO! What are you gonna do, sue Adobe and Disney now? Awww, poor babies, are you dissapointed?

    Haha, yes!

  • Disney supporting open-source? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Prince_Ali ( 614163 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:13AM (#6615846) Journal
    I can feel the slashdotters' brains explode with conflict.

    • Re:Disney supporting open-source? (Score:5, Funny)

      by syle ( 638903 ) * <syle.waygate@org> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:21AM (#6615966) Homepage
      No, that exploding sound you hear is thousands of wine fanatics reading the article and going, "Wine is NOT AN EMULATOR!!"

      • I thought the joke was... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:30PM (#6616792) Journal
        No, that exploding sound you hear is thousands of wine fanatics reading the article and going, "Wine is NOT AN EMULATOR!!

        I thought the joke embedded in the acronym was that it stood for BOTH of:

        - WINdows Emulator.
        - Wine Is Not an Emulator.

        Because it DOES provide a Windows API (which is one of the definitions of "emulator") but DOESN'T software emulate the machine itself (which is part of the USUAL definition of "emulator"), instead running the application's executable code "directly on the metal" - avoiding the massive speed penalty - and doing as much as practical of the API emulation by leveraging Linux native services rather than replacing them.

        But I don't actually KNOW how much of that is true. If one of the WINE core group can confirm or correct this post I'd appreciate it.

    • Re:Disney supporting open-source? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Pope Raymond Lama ( 57277 ) <{gwidion} {at} {mpc.com.br}> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:25AM (#6616021) Homepage
      No. Disney non-supporting Open Source,
      as it has always been.

      Now, instead of using, and helping
      improving The GIMP, "linux people"
      will just run their pirated Photoshops
      and be happy, as oftenly such users
      do not know the difference between free
      and proprietary software.

      • Photoshop is a killer ap. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Prince_Ali ( 614163 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:29AM (#6616072) Journal
        I'm sorry, but Linux needs photoshop. That is one of those programs that some people actually earn their living using. The GIMP is nothing compared to photoshop. It may work for amateurs, but even people who use it as a major hobby could not get the same results with GIMP.

        • Re:Photoshop is a killer ap. (Score:4, Informative)

          by johnnyb ( 4816 ) <jonathan@bartlettpublishing.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:54PM (#6617017) Homepage
          "The GIMP is nothing compared to photoshop. It may work for amateurs, but even people who use it as a major hobby could not get the same results with GIMP."

          I know many people who use the GIMP for great results. I personally use it for menus for VCDs quite a bit, as well as web graphics. Perhaps you are simply not aware of all of it's features?

          In scriptability, when we have a large site to build, we define standard button types, and I make scripts to generate them, and then we just do them in batch, and then as-needed. These are complicated buttons/headings that Photoshop actions don't do well enough for. But with GIMP, it's easy.

          There is one place that GIMP falls flat - print. The lack of CMYK really hurts it for print. Other than that, I can't think of anything really missing from it. Well, maybe PS has better dynamic text support, but that's usually not too big of an issue (GIMP's is definitely good enough).

      • Definition of fanatic (Score:4, Insightful)

        by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) * on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:50AM (#6616337)
        Give him a fresh juicy apple, and he complains that you should have instead figured out how to make the worm in the last apple tastier.

      • Re:Disney supporting open-source? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by vidarh ( 309115 ) <vidar@hokstad.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:53AM (#6616375) Homepage Journal
        I used to sort of like the Gimp, because I thought it had great promise. That was back in '98 or so. It's still mostly stuck with a UI that blows big time. Something as basic as drawing lines is still ridiculously unintuitive. Do you seriously think that the amount of money they spent on getting Photoshop running on Linux would make much difference to the quality of the Gimp?

      • Re:Disney supporting open-source? (Score:5, Informative)

        by ndogg ( 158021 ) <the.rhorn@NoSPAm.gmail.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:10PM (#6616565) Homepage Journal
        I would say, RTFA, but I realize that this is slashdot:
        Although Brooks considered and even tried to use several open-source alternatives, including GIMP, or GNU Image Manipulation Program (see related story), and Cinepaint (formerly FilmGimp), he said he ran into performance issues with the two programs. Artists also found the open-source programs less intuitive to use than Photoshop.

        And while Photoshop is the program of choice among Disney's artist base, Disney is keeping an eye on Cinepaint and is even using the program in a few cases, Brooks said.

        "There's this whole artistic community built around Photoshop, and we couldn't easily move these people to free alternatives," Brooks said. "[But] we hope [Cinepaint] will get to the point where we can use it for more tasks."

    • Re:Disney supporting open-source? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Laxitive ( 10360 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:29AM (#6616077) Journal
      Oh yeah.

      I dislike the company, but there are some really cool, nifty, interesting things, technologically, that disney does.

      One of my favourite examples - The core development team of Squeak smalltalk [squeak.org] is resident at Disney. Smalltalk hackers are a cool bunch. And yes, Squeak is open source.

      Anyway, I'm sure there are many cool nerds at Disney.

      -Laxitive

    • Re:Disney supporting open-source? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:32AM (#6616118) Journal
      " I can feel the slashdotters' brains explode with conflict."

      Disney is just doing what it has always tried to do: Increase shareholder value. If they had decided that it was more cost effective to run all of their workflow on windows they would have done it. Linux is the best of the money according to them so they use it.

    • Tea! (Score:4, Informative)

      by mattbee ( 17533 ) <matthew@bytemark.co.uk> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:00PM (#6616461) Homepage
      Not such a crazy idea, Disney (well go.com) allowed the release of Tea [sf.net], a Java servlet-based scripting language which is a cracking piece of work, coming as it does with great manuals, an IDE with some really smart auto-completion, and providing a statically type, fully compiled web programming environment. We used it on an eCommerce site to great effect, though I'm not sure how much development it's going through these days.

  • so they have configured wine (Score:3, Insightful)

    by minus_273 ( 174041 ) <aaaaa@NOspam.SPAM.yahoo.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:13AM (#6615848) Journal
    to run photoshop. Was this not previously possible?

    • Re:so they have configured wine (Score:5, Informative)

      by mao che minh ( 611166 ) * on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:16AM (#6615881) Journal
      It was really hard to do without crashing with all kinds of errors before, yes. I got Photoshop 5 to run for like 10 minutes once.....

  • ARRGHH!!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <pig DOT hogger AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:14AM (#6615864) Journal
    Why does it takes an EVIL company to do the right thing????

    • Re:ARRGHH!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by innosent ( 618233 ) <jmdority.gmail@com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:31AM (#6616095)
      Why does it takes an EVIL company to do the right thing????

      Ahh, but you're missing the point entirely. This is one of the major strengths of open-source from a corporate perspective. If there is something in an open-source package that does almost what you need, you pay a development team to add the feature in, then you "contribute" your changes back to the open source project, and they maintain it, at no cost to you. Developing software is relatively cheap when compared to maintaining it over a long period of time. So Disney was smart, and they got a feature they needed for relatively little money, and will continue to get it, and updates to it, for free.
      Evil or not, they're not stupid, and it perfectly illustrates why open-source is a good investment for companies.

  • So how long (Score:4, Funny)

    by Keebler71 ( 520908 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:15AM (#6615867) Journal
    ....so how long before we start seeing Tux cameos in Disney toons?

    • Re:So how long (Score:5, Funny)

      by Lord_Slepnir ( 585350 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:26AM (#6616038) Journal
      As a representative of the Disney Corporation, I am pleased to announce the creation of Tucks the Penguin(TM). He will be participating along with BSE the blowfish in a series of movies due out this fall.

      Note: Any attempt to use an image similar to Tucks the Penguin (TM) will result in swift legal action. Have a nice day

  • in a somewhat-related vein (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:16AM (#6615883)
    I wonder if/when Apple will release a powerful yet easy to use image editor to compete with Photoshop. I'd like to see what they can do, as I think Photoshop's UI "is the sux", as the kids say.
    • I agree. While I know people that love it, and love the consistency between all the Adobe products' user interfaces, I can't stand it. I have used Photoshop and Premiere and I even after traning and books on how to use it, it never really "clicked" with me. Just a personal preference I guess.

      I just don't like their interface, and I think it could be much better. But, I think graphics people are so used to it that it will probably never change.

  • speed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tirel ( 692085 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:16AM (#6615885)
    What about speed issues? Isn't photoshop+wine a lot slower than running it in native win32? I can hardly run mirc with wine on a 1ghz computer (only a test, I don't really use mirc ;)

    • I've done it (Score:4, Informative)

      by metalhed77 ( 250273 ) <andrewvcNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:29AM (#6616076) Homepage
      I've done it, the latest CSOffice supports Photoshop 7. For me, it seems to run at about 1/2 to 3/4 speed, depending on what you do.

    • Re:speed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by shanebush ( 301668 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:47AM (#6616305) Homepage
      Speed is not an issue with my setup at all. I have installed Photoshop 7.0 with no windows dlls at all in wine's fake_windows setup. The install ran perfectly for me. Pop in the cd, mount it, and run "wine setup.exe"

      The actual execution of Photoshop has been perfect so far. I have used various builtin filters (but not all) with no problems. Saving files is quicker on Linux than it is on Windows, but then again, I have my drive hdparm'd to the max :-)...

      Oh, btw, I'm running this on a PIII 500mhz w/ 128 meg of ram... not really a high end machine. Again, I have had no real performance issues with running Photoshop under Wine.

      BTW, I am using wine-20030618

    • Re:speed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by afidel ( 530433 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:48AM (#6616309)
      In general WINE is no slower than native Win32, and in many cases is actually faster! Remember WINE is Not an emulator, it is a reimplementation of the Win32 API native to Linux. The Linux guys often do a better job on the reimplementation then the origional coders =) Not sure where the slowness is for mirc, but I know that the mirc code uses almost none of the standard API calls so it's possibly something that is broken in WINE. Btw why run mirc under WINE when there are so many native IRC apps?

      • Re:speed (Score:4, Informative)

        by Shelrem ( 34273 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:04PM (#6616504)
        I'm no fan of Microsoft or anything, but if and when WINE is faster than native Windows, perhaps it's because libwine has a whole lot of stub functions where Windows has functionality. Not that i have a problem with WINE, but it just doesn't do some things that Windows does, and there's a performance benefit for that.

        b.c

  • Make Photoshop Open Source! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Lieutenant_Dan ( 583843 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:17AM (#6615905) Homepage Journal
    I think it would benefit the graphics designers if Photoshop for Linux was made Open Source. The Open Source developer community would be able to enhance the offerings of the Adobe Team by adding new Gaussian blur filters, better fill methodologies, and Ogg Vorbis export functionality.

    The Linux platforms is an untapped market for Adobe and by making Photoshop Open Source, not only would the community forgive them for the ElcomSoft lawsuit but would also create a new revenue stream by offering support and consulting for Linux adopters.

    Only when we free the works of Milne from the clutches of depraved millionaires will we be able to entertain our children.

    Which is nice.
    • You might as well have just said "Make Windows Open Source". Dude, whatever. It's not going to happen. And we don't NEED an Open Source Photoshop. We have The Gimp. It's a decent package that supports everything Photoshop does from filters to layers, as long as you don't need prepress stuff.

  • performance (Score:5, Interesting)

    by poison_reverse ( 647609 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:18AM (#6615911)
    has anyone actually tried to run ps on linux? How does the performance measure up to say a mac or windose box? I would also like to see Adobe golive run nicely on linux too. Maybe adobe will notice the need for its apps on linux and start porting them.

    • Excellent Performance! (Score:4, Informative)

      by jpsowin ( 325530 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:40AM (#6616207) Homepage
      I've used PS7 with Crossover Office before (about three months ago)... it ran very smooth, and very fast! I couldn't tell the difference between on Linux and on XP, except that in XP the widgets look a little sleeker for some reason. I can now finally do quality photo maniulation without banging my head against the wall in Linux ;) I highly recommend Crossover, it's a great product.

    • Re:performance (Score:5, Funny)

      by mph ( 7675 ) <mph@freebsd.org> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:51AM (#6616348)
      has anyone actually tried to run ps on linux?
      Yep.
      How does the performance measure up to say a mac or windose box?
      kronos:~$ uname -sr
      Linux 2.4.18-14
      kronos:~$ time ps
      PID TTY TIME CMD
      4014 pts/6 00:00:00 bash
      4042 pts/6 00:00:00 ps

      real 0m0.041s
      user 0m0.004s
      sys 0m0.025s

    • Re:performance (Score:4, Insightful)

      by WankersRevenge ( 452399 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:53AM (#6616379)
      I've been running it for awhile and it works great. There's slight window redrawing problems, but that's just fluff. The meat of the program is solid. Check out the demo version [codeweavers.com] is you have any doubts. Worth the money.

  • Yay! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by prichardson ( 603676 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:19AM (#6615933) Journal
    Photoshop is probably one of the things that kept Apple going in the dark times. With Photoshop working on Linux there is little reason for a lot of people to stay with windows. This won't make anyone suddenly aware of Linux, but that's because most graphic designers are smart enough to be able to weigh their options. This is why Apple has such a large market share in the design world compared to the consumer world. This probably won't be the killer app for Linux, but it's a VERY big step in the right direction.

    • Re:Yay! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Space Coyote ( 413320 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:30PM (#6616800) Homepage
      Graphic designer "So I hear photoshop runs on linux now, wanna show me how to set it up?" Linux guy: "OK, first you'll need to apply this source patch to WINE, to get photoshopp working. Are your glibc libraries up to date? Which version of GCC is installed on your box? Oh, you wanted to print? that's where it will get complicated..." Graphic designer: "go away" *switches Mac on. Starts working*

  • Cool!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Space_Nerd ( 255762 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:19AM (#6615939)
    But we still hate 'em right?

  • This has been possible for a while now. (Score:5, Informative)

    by aussersterne ( 212916 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:23AM (#6615995) Homepage
    See Crossover Office [codeweavers.com], which is based on Wine, to run Photoshop, Internet Explorer, MS Office and a number of other big-name Windows applications in Linux.

  • numbers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lxy ( 80823 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:24AM (#6616012) Journal
    I don't get where their numbers are coming from.

    Apparently Photoshop on Windows costs $50K+$40K support == $90K

    Photoshop on linux costs $15K.

    Last I checked, Photoshop was around $600 per workstation. XP Pro is $200/station, and I think licenses for NT/2K/2K3 server are around $100/seat. So really, Windows ended up being the cheaper part of of the equation, at $300 per station.

    Support? How is it that Windows support is $40K/yr but linux support is free? There's just as much free Windows support out there as linux.

    I applaud the effort to move off Windows, and I'm glad to see that WINE is of this caliber quality, but don't justify your switch with a bunch of nonsense numbers.

    • Re:numbers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EvilTwinSkippy ( 112490 ) <yoda@nOSpAM.etoyoc.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:51AM (#6616350) Homepage Journal
      Linux support is free, because once you have a standard configuration, you can employ scripts to replicate and maintain it. 2 network engineers at my place take care of 15 Linux servers, 3 Win2k servers, the network, email, and the intranet website. We spend a disproportinate amount of time on the 2K servers, despite having service contracts that theoreitcally should take care of the issues for us.

      Also remember that disney is editing 35MM film, 24 frames per second, at ungodly resolution. They probably have this stuff running on a 4 way or 8 way workstations. Multi-head licenses for windows are STEEP. Microsoft also takes you out the ass for large-scale file storage. The cost per workstation probably includes the cost of the server divided over the number of users.

      With Linux you are paying for the hardware and the photoshop license.

    • Re:numbers (Score:3, Insightful)

      by afidel ( 530433 )
      Maybe the standardization of remote mount points, remote administration, etc which are native to lin/unix that everyone else is seeing are also benifiting Disney? I know that just about every survey I have seen puts the number of machines per unix admin at several times that of the average windows admin. This bears out in my own experience, I'm an MCSE and a RHCE and the amount of time spent per machine to support linux has been much lower overall. I still don't see why their costs are that high though, for

    • Re:numbers (Score:4, Informative)

      by BrotherPope ( 8102 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:28PM (#6616776)
      I don't get where their numbers are coming from.

      Last I checked, Photoshop was around $600 per workstation. XP Pro is $200/station, and I think licenses for NT/2K/2K3 server are around $100/seat. So really, Windows ended up being the cheaper part of of the equation, at $300 per station.

      Start here:
      Today, Brooks runs Photoshop 7.0 on CrossOver Office on more than 200 workstations. CrossWeavers, in turn, has added support of Photoshop 7.0 to its CrossOver Office product.


      So we're talking about 200 times whatever you get hit with under their licensing agreement (Licensing 6.0, anybody?)...

      Development of the porting solution, including site licenses, cost Disney less than $15,000. Had he opted to run Photoshop on Windows machines, it would have cost upward of $50,000 just in annual licensing fees, said Brooks. He estimates support would have been an additional $40,000 a year.


      So, any way you look at it, they're site-licensing Photoshop, so take it out of the equation. Once you do that, this makes sense. 200*250 = 50,000 in licensing per year (let's hear it for subscription software!) and the 40K is presumably for the highest available level of support straight from MS.

      On the other hand, $15k was kicked over to CodeWeavers (along with whatever the other two 'mystery studios' kicked in) so they would focus on Photoshop support in Crossover Office. Presumably, the actual licenses and support deals came out of the same bucket. This is quite likely, as Codeweavers offers terrific support with any purchase, let alone 200 licenses!

      I applaud the effort to move off Windows, and I'm glad to see that WINE is of this caliber quality, but don't justify your switch with a bunch of nonsense numbers.

      The nonsense numbers are purely your own, I assure you.

  • CrossOver Office has been doing this (Score:3, Informative)

    by nacs ( 658138 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:26AM (#6616035) Journal
    Crossover Office [codeweavers.com] 2.0 has official support for Adobe Photoshop.

    I installed PS 7 on my P4 2.4Ghz and is ran quite nicely. It's amazing how far Wine has come.

  • Me too... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ryanvm ( 247662 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:26AM (#6616041)
    I find that wine helps me use a lot of Linux applications too. In fact, I have to be flat out drunk before I'll even start Emacs.

    [Yikes - who threw that?!]

  • Cool article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EZmagz ( 538905 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:26AM (#6616042) Homepage
    I thought this was an interesting article, and it's nice to see that Disney was able to save a pretty decent chunk of change by running Linux and wine instead of Windows on their desktops. I'd still give my left testicle to be able to play in the Disney/Pixar/etc. animation studios and computing centers...talk about horsepower!

    On a related note, I'm still kind of surprised that Adobe wouldn't port Photoshop over to Linux even for a company with as much clout as Disney. Seriously, I realize it's a LOT of work to port an app that massive, but if basically every animator who runs linux wants it, why not? Catering to your customers is definitely part of a good business model. Since Adobe's management switched over not too far back though, I think some of the crazy innovations might be slower-coming these days. Guess that's what happens when you replace someone with vision (Adobe founder) with a Marketing drone (current CEO, IIRC).

  • Damn you Disney... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ndogg ( 158021 ) <the.rhorn@NoSPAm.gmail.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:29AM (#6616073) Homepage Journal
    Why can't you just be the evil company that you're supposed to be?!

    ARGH!!!

  • CrossOver Office + PS7 (Score:5, Informative)

    by SQLz ( 564901 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:31AM (#6616091) Homepage Journal
    I have Photoshop 7 running with CrossOver office on a AthonXP 2800+ and Gentoo, runs like a dream. Its actually never crashed and even the auto online update thingy works. Speed wise, the app feels like your running Redhat. Sometimes things take a second to draw and mouse events are slower than normal. You also cannot resize the toolbar thing, thats ok though.

  • Puzzled (Score:3, Interesting)

    by linuxislandsucks ( 461335 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:31AM (#6616092) Homepage Journal
    If the same license fees are paid to Adobe for photoshop no matter if you run on Windows or Linxu where is the huge savings? Did MS change the fees fo desktop windows as of late4 without telling us?

  • Confusion (Score:5, Funny)

    by magsymp ( 562489 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:31AM (#6616102)
    I'm confused... I thought I was supposed to hate Disney. Have the slashgods turned they back on me, again!?

    SCO is still bad right?

  • What about color calibration/colorspace mgmt? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by isaac ( 2852 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:31AM (#6616106)
    Can anyone whose done real work with Photoshop-on-WINE comment on how they deal with display calibration and colorspace issues? How do you make sure what you see on your linux box is what you get from your film printer?

    -Isaac

  • Applications applications applications (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:35AM (#6616150)

    Getting popular applications like this running on Linux is the single most important thing to get Linux on the desktop.

    Note that Adobe could probably release a native version of Photoshop to run on Linux fairly easily. They had a Unix version, and also of course it will run on OSX, so going native to Linux can't be that big an issue.

    Everyone who wants to see Linux on the desktop should be pestering the companies of the software they use to release a Linux version. For me, the important one is Macromedia Flash, so I've been emailing Macromedia asking when they are going to port it. If you want to see Linux on the desktop, start pestering!

  • So? Its a windwos binary.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:39AM (#6616198) Homepage Journal
    What would be really great news is that there was a native *nix version again. ( there was one for SGI long ago.. so they cant claim it cant be done ).

    While using it in wine may be nice, and shows wine is improving, ( hats off to their team ) it really doesn't mean THAT much in the grand scheme of things.... we don't want to be relegated to just be an 'emulator' ( yes i know its not 100% accurate to say emulation, but you get the point so its close enough )
    • I'm torn by this too. You're point appears valid, Linux shouldn't become an "emulator" for Windows software.

      On the other hand, if enough people start using Photoshop in Linux via wine, it might create a critical mass of users to compel Adobe to do a native version.

  • Old Timer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blinder ( 153117 ) <blinder.daveNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @11:41AM (#6616227) Homepage Journal
    I've been using Photoshop since the 2.5 days (pre layers -- when real men [and women] used alpha channels) on Macs. I then switched over to using pshop on the PC because, well, I couldn't afford a mac!

    But then, something strange happened. I had been using Linux (Redhat) as my OS-of-choice at home and would switch to my laptop (running 2k) to do Photoshop work. Out of the desire to use my mouse, I went and sunk a few bucks and bought the crossover application [codeweavers.com] (commercial version of wine) and whalla! Photoshop 6 runs on my linux box, and faster!

    So, now I can use Photoshop with my mouse (instead of that annoying touch-pad). The only thing that is a little annoying is that the focus of the tool bar and the other pallets take away from the canvas, so if you click on the marquee tool, you have to "double click" on the canvas to get the focus where you need it. Not a big deal, just a "thing."

  • If Adobe, Quark, and Macromedia (Score:3, Interesting)

    by greymond ( 539980 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:20PM (#6616671) Homepage Journal
    Made Linux versions of their software I would never have to use Windows or OS-X again, and would be a much nerdier and happier person (happier cause I wouldn't have to keep upgrading both my expensive OS's).....

    Of course there is a 99% chance that will NEVER happen, and even if I use Wine or (insert YOUR favorite Crossover app) I still have to have windows on a partition - hence I still am supposed to buy/pay for a copy of windows - so why not just have Windows....

  • Now, what about this? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mkro ( 644055 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @12:58PM (#6617068)
    From the end of the article:
    However, Disney's legal department has developed a policy that enables Disney to protect its intellectual property while keeping within the statutes of the GNU General Public License.
    ...and there is no mention of what that policy is. Would be interesting to know, since we are - as we all know - dealing with a good, old-fashioned Evil Corporation here. Could be nothing, but I'm rather suspicious by default when it comes to Disney.

  • Contact Adobe (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Grip3n ( 470031 ) on Tuesday August 05, 2003 @01:19PM (#6617390) Homepage
    If you're interested in contacting Adobe, here's a direct link to their Feature Request form. I suggest as many of us as possible to visit this page and let Adobe know there certainly is a demand for their product. We're talking 3 studios here, including Disney. Lets make some (positive) noise!

    http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html [adobe.com]

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