Linux revisited

Rediscovering Linux.

I've been an on and off Linux user for a number of years and found it interesting but not a serious contender as an alternative operating system.

For those of us who also shoot digital, a piece of  Windows software that I've always found to be really useful in the studio was the Canon remote shooting utility.   This enabled me to run the camera from my desktop keyboard and view the images almost immediately which I found to be invaluable.

Being able to examine an image in full screen and high resolution really helped in fine tuning the lighting, the pose and any makeup and wardrobe adjustments that may have gone unnoticed on the small camera LCD.

This was fine for indoors but I wanted to be tethered away from the desktop and I don't have a Windows OS on my aging laptops so I thought I'd install a new Linux distro and see if there was a solution available.

After a bit if research I decided to update my aged Linux Mint to the latest version 16 Petra and I was pleasantly surprised at how nicely it all ran.

In my opinion Mint has matured into a totally useable operataing system that rivals the big boys in just about every way.    

The installation was simple and smooth and the performance far exceeded my expectations.

Even The Gimp (Photoshop equivilent) which I once found to be not very user-friendly looks really slick and useable.   This is a quite powerful  photo editing tool for those wishing to go one step further than the more basic software that is currently on the market.

There is a good range of free software available to carry out most of the tasks that we require and you can even run some programs from other operating systems via the additional WINE software.

What I was looking for was Entangle, a remote shooting ultility that would work on the Linux platform.

At the moment I'm still getting familiar with the program and so far it's working well.

Many of us have had enough of forking out excessive amounts of money particularly for overpriced image processing software and it's well worth considering the free alternatives if they can do the job adequately well.

Have a look at the Mint home page here www.linuxmint.com/‎ and maybe breathe some new life into that old, tired laptop or desktop computer.

Bob