Switching art students to GNU/Linux

[newbie2]

I'm an art professor, and last semester I embarked on an exciting new adventure by erasing Mac OS X from nearly all of the Macintoshes in our digital media lab and installing Ubuntu in its place.
http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/03/09/2238246.shtml?tid=37
:cool:

[dermotti]

Very cool.

[LinuxKid]

was it ubuntu or kubuntu?

Using Synaptic it was easy to install Konqueror along with the OpenSSH client and server. Konqueror served as a nice GUI for file transfer via SSH, simply by typing in fish:// and the network address in Konqueror's Location field.

[moma]

http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/03/09/2238246.shtml?tid=37
:cool:
Thanks, it's really informative!

For vector graphics I prefer Inkscape
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape

However Xara Xtreme... (http://www.xaraxtreme.org/) is now available for Linux. It's open source too. You may read: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1872
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara

Unfortunately Xara is not natively SVG... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVG) based, but I understand that they work on a Xara <-> SVG converter... (http://scratchcomputing.com/projects/uber-converter/)

Anyway I run Xara though Klik & Run... (http://klik.atekon.de/) (0-install) mechanism on my Ubuntu and it works really well (I do only basic drawing work).

We should also mension the amazing ImageMagick toolset.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageMagick
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http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php
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http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-graf2/?ca=dgr-lnxw15GraphicsLine

A good alternative is http://www.graphicsmagick.org/
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More stuff here
http://www.futuredesktop.org/OpenOffice.html
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http://www.futuredesktop.org/how2burn.html
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PS. Take your weekly Ajax dose... (http://ajaxlaunch.com/postnuke/html/index.php) where
the first run is AjaxWrite... (http://www.linspire.com/ajaxwrite.php)
Swallow the whole story: http://slashdot.org/articles/06/03/23/1923248.shtml

[OffHand]

Nice one. I think it's great you show them the possibilities of Linux and give them an alternative to os x/xp. It's all about choise. Too bad software like max msp and isadora isn't available on Linux yet. Also I think you should keep teaching them the standard packages (like avid and fcp) because a lot of your art students probably end up working in the advertisement industry or at the tv.
Therefor they will need to know how to work with avid and fcp (among others).
My 2 cents for what it's worth :D
Goodluck with your project,
Subsonic

[BoyOfDestiny]

was it ubuntu or kubuntu?

Ubuntu. He wouldn't have had to download konqueror with synaptic in kubuntu.