I am embarking upon an experiment with Ubuntu Linux + vmware virtualization of XP Pro to run apps like Lightroom and CS3. I'm curious if anyone around here a) Uses linux and b) has tried anything like this.

I have some reasons for thinking this might work well, but I don't want to waste time typing it if nobody is interested. The short of it is that I'm more comfortable using Ubuntu as an operating system than OS X or Windows.

Heehee, you might end up with a couple of takers. I'm too lazy to do all that, but I actually have an alternate boot on my system for ubuntu. (in case windows just dies and we need something to boot from...I've never actaully used it....i just do inux at work)

Is there any documentation out there for how well lightroom or photoshop run on a virtualized xp? i'd have to say i'm a skeptic, but very interested to see what you can do with it!

best of luck!

I actually never researched to see if anybody else had done this, just assumed that I was in uncharted territory. Funny who ends up being linux users, I never would have pegged you as one. Then again, there are tons of tech-savvy people who are vehemently opposed to it... but I digress.

I'm just now setting this up. My original plan was to go all apple, but I've run into two issues with that. First, Apple hardware is expensive, and second, I've realized that I'm not really as pro-Apple as I thought I was, just very anti-Microsoft. So when it comes to the bottom line, I already own two licenses of XP Pro that aren't in use, why not use them?

Virtualization actually eliminates a lot of my issues with Windows. Most of those issues I can eventually fight through, but the main reason is vmware provides a buffer against crappy hard disk access. Something about windows + software raid just doesn't work right. Ubuntu, on the other hand, configured my disks perfectly and I have had no issues with disk access.

This is definately going to be a science project. If there's enough interest I'll post a review of this setup along with advantages and disadvantages.

I use linux on my primary desktop machine at my day job. I've used vmware before, but I've never tried to run the adobe products on it. It worked well for me, and I'm inclined to think there wouldn't be any problem using the Adobe products. You'll just need to have giant amounts of memory so you can allocate enough to the VM.

I'd definitely be interested in what you discover as you experiment with this.

Wow, I'm really surprised to see this! I've been installing kubuntu on a few older machines, and I thought "what the heck - I wonder what it'd be like!"

Google is supposedly investing in wine for photoshop. (They have picasa set up with wine already). I haven't tried it yet, but from what I've heard, 7.0, CS, and CS2 are good. I have CS3, I'll see what I get there.

I've been playing a bit with lightzone and raw therapee. F-Spot is nice (it does versioning). Bibble has a linux version too.

Of course, digikam is installed right with kubuntu (.9 or higher) but so far, lightzone seems the most powerful, f-spot the easiest workflow.

I think linux has a ton of potential for photographers (extremely light OS, customizable to the end, and lots of powerful tools) but I think it's a bit immature on the software side. I'd love to see adobe release LR for linux, or Aperture for linux!

I'll keep you posted with my wine experiments - maybe we'll find a good solution!

Shan

It really depends on the processor you're running. It absolutely bites the big one to run LR or PS in a VM if your processor doesn't have the para-virtualization extensions. I use virtualbox (with paravirtualization) on my dell 1420 (intel graphics) and it runs darn near native speed. I really can't complain, and with VirtualBox I can transfer files easily back and forth. I'm not a fan of VMWare's products because they're closed source.

I used to try to use GIMP but I absolutely abhor the way that it pushes pixels, Krita is ok, but not quite what i'm looking for. And I don't know if you've done any raw processing with UFRaw or DCRaw but it's damn hard to get the same results as with Bridge/Lightroom. For alot of images I've got a custom version of image magick that i use to batch process.

I have had some pretty good success getting CS2 to run in wine. I just had to compile wine from source, but It was still a bit buggy and would crash at in-opportune times. I didn't/haven't tried Lightroom. I am also super hesitant to use my ubuntu system for editing because it's out of the box colors are way different than my Windows ones were so I couldn't calibrate on windows and bring the profile over, and my spyder wouldn't work virtualized. That however was quite a few months ago. Now ArgyllCMS supports the spyder2 if you supply the firmware. And it might suport your colorimeter as well. This thread on Photo.net is superuseful as well.

I have to say that I personally don't think mac's are worth the money, especially since they a hell of a lot more proprietary than even Windows. I do love my ubuntu system (I literally use it 98% of the time.) I only switch over to vista to do my editing. Since I literally jjust have Vista and my software I was way way way more productive. And heck, i have this dumb vista licence that came with my computer so why not use it, eh?

I love to geek out about this sort of thing.

Have you seen Pixel? Much better than GIMP IMHO.

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/

Not free, but darn close.

I saw the ArgyllCMS - I'm going to try that too. I just installed lightroom with Wine, and it would do everything but actually SHOW the images. Makes it pretty worthless. :-(

Bibble looks nice, if you can get used to the layout. Fast, has Noise Ninja built in, and it's been around long enough to have decent support.

(I love the way everything with linux is spelled wrong ROFL - Kan u chek mi kamera 4 mi?)

Are you using Ubuntu or Kubuntu (with the KDE extensions)? I have Kubuntu 7.1 (Feisty). I'm new at this, so why did/would you go with the gnome vs kde?

Shan

I've been following pixel for the past 2.5 years actually. It's still just too buggy for me to really work with. I can't really understand how but it seems inconsistent with doing the same operations like modifying levels. Also I got incredibly frustrated when it would crash if i accidently triple clicked with the select tool or crop tool. Pavel is an amazing guy and one of the most brilliant programmers I've talked to.

I really wanted to like bibble, i really did. But the workflow style it needed was just not what fit with my style. But it did do the best job of processing raw images.

I went with Gnome instead of KDE because at the time, KDE was not fully open source. There was always the possibliity that it could become closed at any time and charge heavy royalties for using it. Gnome on the otherhand was totally free and worked very solidly for me. I am also more comfortable with the layout, and underlying (gconf) control scheme of gnome.

I'm not really terribly picky, I really just can't wait till Elbuntu is more polished and (hopefully) officially supported. I'm a very big enlightenment fan, Raster is an incredible guy. His code is so clean and comparementalized it's mind boggling. He is a coder i look up to and desperately wish to be able to emulate.

Have you tried Krita? It is really pretty good and gets the job done. I still don't know how much I like it but it's not all too bad.

I still really love imagemagick. It's mostly command line but it gives me a great way to do batch edits to images. or Take finished images and pump out resized images to one directory and thumbnails for it to another and also even generate a file that lets me quickly make a SimpleViewer gallery.

OK, day 1 of my virtualized workflow... and I'm not certain this is going to work out as well as I had hoped. It will be functional, but I think no matter how I try to rationalize it or get around it, my hardware just isn't going to cut it.

As far as using native linux apps, I have yet to find one that doesn't fall under one of these two categories (most fall under both) 1) obnoxiously buggy 2) frustratingly clunky. If I can find one that is reliable and somewhat polished I'll start using it.

I know that Photoshop CS2 will run under WINE now, and they are going to continue working to bring CS3 online. It seems to me as though since Adobe is releasing a mac version, it shouldn't be too difficult to also release a linux binary, but I guess the market doesn't really demand it yet.

I guess it's time to keep an eye out for a nice core 2 duo motherboard/proc combo - my faithful P4 Xeons just aren't cutting it.

Oh jeeez. Creating a Linux binary would be tons and tons of work for the adobe folk. Despite the underpinings of OSX being BSD all the apple libraries don't make it as trivial as it should be to pop out a linux binary. And since they take so much advantage of the OSX libraries that let you do image transforms on the GPU instead of the CPU it would really have to be a total re-write...

And def look for a core 2 and make sure you can do paravirtualization with it, the speed increase is mind boggling.

I've used some core 2 systems at work and I'm really impressed with them. I think I'm going to try to squeeze another 8-10 months out of this system and get into the new architecture intel has on their roadmap right when it comes out. The system is currently tolerable, but I'll know for sure how this is going to work as I undertake the processing of an e-session and design a guest book this week.

Yeah, I'm sure you could def squeeze out atleast that long. It's not like your system is lacking in speed! I can't wait for the new chips, mostly because I really want the quad core stuff to come down and more dd3 chipsets would be awesome as well. Intel def has some cool stuff coming out. Shame that AMD has fallen so far behind.

I agree on AMD... I used to be a huge fan but right now they can't seem to do anything right.

Exactly. Phenom.... *sigh* good try, now go back to the drawing board and don't screw up this time.

Hey Matt I realize you're probably not interested but check out this pretty darn good deal.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/se...CCODE=WEM1573BY

Woot had a complete system along these lines yesterday for about $600. It was a gateway, but the components checked out pretty well. I'm actually fairly satisfied with how this is performing so far. Lightroom slams my processors but everything still stays pretty responsive. I think I'm going to sink my next hardware money into a really nice monitor... this 17incher is killing me!

That woot was mildly tempting. But I like knowing the manufacturer of my products, though really, i would get one in a second if i was in a pinch.
Heh, 17 is a bit small esp if you've got your palettes nice and spread out in photoshop. Any idea who's manufacturing the panels that go in the acer lcd's? Is it themselves or samsung?

Matt,

It seems like you are pretty far down the path already, I can tell you that Lightroom and at least CS2 do run in this type of configuration. I spent five years at Red Hat running IT and your comments about the difficulties in getting applications vendors to port to Linux are true, becuase there is just no return on investment. The number of people who run Linux desktops is still infinitesimal.

Due to the nature of virtualization, however, making them perfromant enough to justify the effort is very difficult. If you are looking to consolidate everything on one OS for convenience, then this should be grat. If you are planning on seeing performance like you might get out of a native Linux app or better than native Windows or Mac, then you are probably not going to be satisfied.


Frank

I haven't researched LCD manufacturers in forever. I really do need to upgrade though, so I'm going to start looking into it. I do know that the Acer 24inch has received very positive reviews on NewEgg, but I haven't looked into it any further than that.



I think that over the next few years the balance of power is going to shift significantly. I think Linux will always be the underdog, but I expect that we will start to see more widespread acceptance with projects like Ubuntu that are receiving noteable corporate backing. I am fairly pleased with the performance of my setup right now. I processed through an e-session in about 90 minutes last night and even on my outdated hardware you probably wouldn't have known that I was running in a vm instead of a real desktop. There are some annoying graphical lag glitches, particularly when switching between RAW files, but I'm really not sure that lightroom would perform that much better running natively on the same OS.

Ok, I've been playing (I went out and bought a new hard drive just to play! LOL)

I installed Kubuntu 8.10 (Edgy - beta 5 version) and it has lots of good stuff. It uses DCRaw 8.81, which supports Canon 40D cr2 files (among many, many others!)

I've also installed RawStudio (seems OK for now) and Lightzone (good adjustments, slow conversions).

For resizing, I found that running Faststone under wine is actually faster than some of the native apps, plus they have a nice border option (including watermarks, etc).

I haven't been able to get lightroom to work (it installs OK, but nothing more than that). I haven't gotten around to trying CS3 under wine, but with google throwing money at it, I'm sure it won't be long!

I have noticed a trend of linux surfacing more than usual lately, and I think it really has potential.

The one thing that I really wish I could get working is fotofusion for album design. I haven't found anything on any platform that works as easily as that program. (I've looked at scribus, and while it could do the job, it's obviously designed for text+images, not the other way around.)

Any suggestions that link to the image file, rather than using layers (like PS / GIMP / etc)?

Shan

Just get a MAC!

But seriously, this is a very interesting thread and I am glad to hear that Linux is doing so well. Competition is great, and I think Linux can give those using PCs, which are very good hardware, a real alternative to Microsoft junk.

I just wish companies like Adobe would take Linux seriously as it is a better and more stable OS than Windows...

I wish you all well!

One of linux's main problems is that they don't have a champion for the professional desktop like apple does. Linus Torvalds is a server guy at the heart, and as such if there's two ways to go, the way that benefits the server will win. He's also just not that dynamic at promoting it. The Ubuntu guys have come as close as anybody to achieving a mainstream linux distro, but it's still a very young distro and will have to sign on another major manufacturer such as HP to distribute it on the desktop. Even that won't be enough if professionals don't start using it and demanding a port of various pro applications. Best case scenario that I see is linux being 2-3 years from being taken seriously, and that's only if Ubuntu keeps its act together and keeps expanding their presence.

Well, I've been playing for a while now, an here's some things that I've found:

(I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 - went away from the KDE environment and the more I use it, the more I like it!)

Canon DPP runs well under WINE. It's still extremely fast, awesome color, and very, very little difference in the interface. (There is a little glitch with the folder view, but hiding it and showing it fixes the problem if you have it).

Lightzone (www.lightcrafts.com) has some really great tools that even photoshop or lightroom doesn't have. It's based on the zone system, and has nice presets (you can customize your own presets too). It's free for linux users.

Picasa is pretty much seamless, even though it's using WINE. It's a great little tool for cataloging, sorting, and basic edits (I like their straighten tool much better than anything from Adobe) and it leaves your original files (raw or JPG) untouched. Their auto-color is the best auto correction I've seen.

ROES works perfect (as expected, since it's Java). Candid2000 even lets you design albums with their ROES system (although I find it slow and clunky). I haven't tried Pictage's album design software, but I would expect it to be flawless too.

One thing that was a nice surprise is the Evolution Mail program. It's got some really nice features (right click on an email to make it a task, integrated calendar, etc).

I've found a few slideshow programs (Picasa, fspot, etc) but not much with the Ken Burns Effect. GLSlideshow has it, but it looks like it's been abandoned as a program. Ubuntu has it built in as a screen saver, but it doesn't allow you to choose a folder. You have to download the GLScreensaver-config (so easy with the Add/Remove Applications - 10K+ free programs!).

Support is great on the forums. Not having anyone to call isn't a big deal to me, since I would rather search on the internet anyway.

Wireless networking - perfect. Absolutely no issues.

Windows networking - again, perfect. I can access my server just like it's a local folder. No mapping, mounting, etc.

As a programmer, the only thing I find I'm missing is a flash creation tool. I'm going to see if I can get swish to run with wine (haven't tried yet) but I'm not super fussed right now.

The only thing still I'm looking for is stand alone album creation software. I've been playing with GIMP, and the more I use it, the easier it is. A surprise was the healing brush - it is real-time healing (as you paint, it heals - no processing afterwards). Probably more to do with my lack of practice (7+ years of photoshop vs 3 weeks of GIMP) but we'll see. Wine support for CS3 isn't far off.

I'm here at WPPI, and I talked a little with Bibble (their software works natively on Linux). Still wish I could get used to their workflow.

I will say this, I've gotten quite a bit of attention when I say I'm running Linux rather than Mac or Windows!

Just a little update. I'm headed down to meet up with [b] now.

Shan

Thanks for the update - it's not really the direction I was going when I started the thread, but with the success you seem to be having I might give a native linux workflow a shot. I am really pleased with how lightroom is working in a virtual environment. Every now and then the virtual machine totally locks up for anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes, but eventually it figures out what it's doing and starts flying again. This seems to be related to swiching in and out of the virtual machine. Overall I would say my user experience is a 7 out of 10 (to borrow a cheesy M$ Vista indicator), but it would be resolved if I was running a core 2 chip instead of a 3+ year old P4 Xeon.

Hey Matt! I just stumbled across this thread by accident but I've been using Ubuntu now for just over a year on my desktop and laptop. When I read your original post, I was like, I DO THAT!

I tried to run some of the apps like PS CS2 and Lightroom 1.2 in WINE... good god, it was dodgy at best. Previous to that, I had run everything in VM and it went pretty well... but I wanted to see what it would be like if I didn't have it boot the VM up every time I wanted to edit photos. I don't mind the booting up so much anymore.

I'm currently running Ubuntu 7.10 as well (haven't bothered to upgrade to 8.04 as my boyfriend is running it on the laptop and hasn't really noticed that much of a difference... and we're too lazy!). I run PS CS3 and Lightroom 1.4 in the VM as well as Showit Web.

I'm happy with the set-up I've got and recently got some more RAM to allocate more virtual memory to the VM. I've got 2 of 4 GB of RAM dedicated solely for the VM and it's running pretty nicely!

I don't have any input, but I would like to Crown you the Geek King of OSP.
I bow before your Geekery.

matt, you can come over and work on my new mac pro! it's blazin! and amazin!

Hey there Jenne,
Welcome to the Geeks club!
What virtualization software are you using? Are you running it with the VM extensions (paravirtualization)? XP or Vista host? Laptop or Desktop? Specs? How's the speed? On mine even with the virtualization extensions batch processing jobs, like exporting in lightroom were too darn slow. I figure it's because of harddrive access.

There's not a terribly big difference between 8.04 and 7.10, which is a good thing. 8.04 is the new long term support release so it's really designed just to get more stable as time goes on. That's about the only compelling reason to upgrade. The new firefox is pretty cool, and if you're running gnome it's a little snappier, but yeah, not much of a difference. But if you use any windows (samba) shares, don't switch yet! There's a bug that won't allow authentication.

Awesome! I get entry into the coolest club on OSP!

I'm currently running Ubuntu on my desktop and while I also have a dual-boot Windows system, I've hardly ever used it since I got the VM up and running.

I'm not running the VM with paravirtualization extensions, although I don't think VMWare makes use of them on a 32-bit system.

Speed-wise, it's good. I don't really notice a difference between booting Windows in the VM versus on bare hardware. I'm running the VM with 2 GB of RAM (LR and PS got bogged down when I was only using 1 GB of RAM in the past). I have LR importing/exporting over the network (Gbit ethernet) and it works just fine.

- Hardware Specs:
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ "Venice" (no AMD Virtualization)
- NVIDIA nForce 4 Ultra motherboard
- NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT videocard
- 3 GB DDR RAM

- Host Software Specs:
- Ubuntu 7.10 32-bit
- VMWare Player

- VM Hardware configuration:
- 1 CPU core
- 2 GB RAM

- VM Software:
- Windows XP Pro
- Adobe Lightroom 1.4
- Adobe PS CS3

I'll think about upgrading the hardware down the line sometime but it's not a priority right now. I really like the set-up I have right now!

Wow that's a heck of a system you have built up there. I'm pretty sure that vmware takes advantage of the para-virtualization on 32 but I do use VirtualBox so it may be different. It's amazing how big a difference the para-virt makes. You think it's fast now? It speeds up considerably beyond that, though i'm sure you're not hurting for speed as it is!

It's really cool to see a few other linux users on this board. I have been having a blast getting color management into gimp, and fix up some plugins from 2.2 to 2.4. Sadly these next 3 weeks are going to be killer busy because of volunteer work so I won't be able to get as far as I'd like, but there's always after that.