Posts from the ‘Scribus’ Category
OpenIndiana 151a is out – and powered by Illumos
In case you haven’t already heard, OpenIndiana development release 151a is out. The critical change in this release is that it’s now based on the Illumos kernel, developed by star ex-Sun Microsystems talent in the wake of Oracle’s compeltely styleless killing off of OpenSolaris. Substantial new features which you won’t be seeing in Solaris 11 anytime soon such as KVM support are built-in and tightly integrated. And yes, KVM support for AMD CPUs is on the way – hopefully in time for the 8-core AMD Bulldozer architecture desktop CPUs…
There are also a nice set of desktop software additions, some of which OpenIndiana and OpenSolaris before it has been needing for ages, for example a capable suite of multimedia playback applications. OpenIndiana now has dedicated SFE repositories from which VLC and Mplayer can be installed, as well as bonus goodies such as Scribus and more.
OpenIndiana download links, release notes, and SFE repository details:
http://openindiana.org/
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/oi_151a+Release+Notes
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Spec+Files+Extra+Repository
After running 151a for a few days (the upgrade from release 148 was completely seamless by the way), I was presented with something I hadn’t seen for a long time, not since OpenSolaris development was closed off a couple years back…
Build Scribus 1.3.6.svn on OpenSolaris x64 – part 2 (UPDATED)
Full build instructions as copied/pasted from my bug report – note that this will enable you to build Scribus, but opening/saving Scribus project files is broken. If anyone has a workaround for this let me know…and hopefully the Scribus developers will have a fix soon.
EDIT: Saving files does work (there is a bug report here), given the following workaround. It seems Cmake ignores the install directory specified by -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=~/scribusinstall. If you copy the contents of sfw_stage to ~/scribusinstall, saving .sla files apparently then works fine. See below for these commands, options, and directories in context.
Also be warned that this whole process can take a while – building Qt for example on an Intel Q8200 quad-core system took about a couple of hours.
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BUILDING AND INSTALLING SCRIBUS 1.3.6.svn ON OPENSOLARIS DEVELOPMENT BUILD 134 X64
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Saturday 13th March 2010
=> INSTALL OPENSOLARIS X64
Download osol-dev-134-x86.iso from http://www.genunix.org/
Test case system is an Intel Q8200 (Gigabyte EG31MF-S2 system board) with 4GB RAM.
=> INSTALL PREREQUISITE PACKAGES
Use the OpenSolaris IPS package manager GUI to install the following:
versioning/subversion
gcc-3
cmake
gettext
header-xorg
= BUILD AND INSTALL QT 4.6.2 FROM SOURCE
Download qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.2.tar.gz from http://qt.nokia.com/downloads
Copy and unpack the file to /tmp
In /tmp/qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.2/ run the following:
$ ./configure -platform solaris-g++ -no-webkit $ gmake $ pfexec gmake install
This installs Qt at the default location of /usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.6.2
(Note: if you encounter mmap errors when building, increase the swap space following the instructions at http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/article/2649)
Add the following to your ~/.profile (assuming ksh or bash)
QTDIR=/usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.6.2; export QTDIR
=> BUILD AND INSTALL SCRIBUS
$ mkdir ~/scribusinstall $ mkdir ~/scribussource $ cd ~/scribussource $ svn co svn://scribus.info/Scribus/branches/Version135 $ cd Version135/Scribus $ mkdir builddir $ cd builddir $ /usr/bin/cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=~/scribusinstall $ make $ pfexec make install
Scribus binary is installed to ~/scribussource/Version135/Scribus/builddir/sfw_stage/bin. See the edit at the top of this page to complete the installation.
Build Scribus 1.3.6.svn on OpenSolaris x64 – UPDATED
(EDIT: looks like I’m unable to open nor save .SLA files with this – which is not particularly useful. Stay tuned…)
(EDIT #2: see here for the workaround)
This has taken me an age to complete, but I’ve had success in the last hour.
My bug report is here. In summary, on Ubuntu Linux (for example) the latest development builds of Scribus have no problems with the Qt packages available from the (Synaptic) default repositories. On OpenSolaris however, this doesn’t seem to be the case with Qt packages available at http://solaris.bionicmutton.org, as I’ve discovered after many hours fruitless tinkering.
I’ve found that I can build Scribus 1.3.6.svn successfully, using Qt 4.6.2 as built from source. Thankfully this is a pretty straightforward (albeit long) process.
Details covering package prerequisites etc are now here.
Build Scribus 1.3.6.svn in Ubuntu 9.10
Something to pass the time while I figure out why it won’t build on OpenSolaris…
Assuming a base, freshly patched install of Ubuntu 9.10 x86, install these packages using Synaptic package manager:
subversion
cmake
libcups2-dev
libtiff4-dev
python2.6-dev
g++
qt4-qmake
libqt4-dev
libxml2-dev
libcairo2-dev
Then:
mkdir ~/scribusinstall mkdir ~/scribussource cd ~/scribussource svn co svn://scribus.info/Scribus/branches/Version135 cd ~/scribussource/Version135/Scribus mkdir builddir cd builddir cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=~/scribusinstall make sudo make install cd ~/scribusinstall/bin ./scribus
Install and/or run qtconfig to fine-tune the look and feel of Qt-based applications (on Linux, sudo apt-get install qt4-qtconfig).
Scribus – New Zealand book
From Marcus Holland-Moritz, a stunning example of outstanding design chops coupled with open source software – and a New Zealand reference (my home) to boot:
http://zrox.org/nzbook/
http://nzbook.mhxnet.de
In the author’s own words:
“I’ve put several months of work into this project. It features about 200 out of the 15,000 photos I took during my five weeks “down under” along with some anecdotes about my journey across the two islands of New Zealand.
The book was created exclusively using free and open source software. It is itself available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license.”
As I put it in my other entry about Scribus, I know of people who couldn’t assemble anything anywhere near this good with full access to a megabucks Adobe CS license.
The book may be purchased at: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1168184 – and I might just purchase a copy myself. I love open source!
Scribus, anyone?
While atttempting to help a friend with a combined MS Publisher / PDF issue (and the various compatibility issues encountered along the way) I did a bit of searching for a FOSS DTP application and came across this:
Sure looks cool – interesting summary on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribus
In particular:
“Scribus cannot read or write the native file formats of commercial programs like QuarkXPress, Microsoft Publisher, or InDesign; the developers feel that reverse engineering those file formats would be prohibitively complex and could risk legal action from the makers of those programs.“
Which suits me as I’m looking for a path to get the hell away from proprietary file formats.
Anyone out there using this? Came across a positive albeit old review from the awesome Ben Rockwood:
http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=354
Further promising signs:
http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Made_with_Scribus
The online mag here is very impressive – I know of people who couldn’t put together anything anywhere near this good with full access to a megabucks Adobe CS Suite license, and aside from Scribus the whole shebang has been put together with free software:
Interestingly Resene Paints (New Zealand – my home town like) are a sponsor of Scribus…
http://www.scribus.net/?q=taxonomy/term/31
Seeing businesses smart enough to patronise FOSS projects like this – especially local businesses – gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
Time to download it on an Ubuntu VM and give it a spin methinks…
