Category: free software

Three days ago at work, I received an email with the ‘final approval’ for a new notebook/laptop computer (everyone around here calls them ‘laptops’, but they’re sometimes too hot and/or too heavy to keep them on your lap for long). And yesterday, I got another mail telling me that the item was ‘shipped’, plus one from our local post office in Frankfurt – it had arrived.

Of course it didn’t arrive with what I had ordered – the IBM Open Client, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3. Instead, it had an image based on Windows 7 on it – which I wiped, and until the end of our office hours I had Debian GNU/Linux (the stable version 8, codename “Jessie”) running on it. But nevertheless, I wasn’t finished trying out the hardware, so I took it home. Here are some detail shots of it:

It’s a Lenovo Thinkpad P50, and I had to wait for it – all the colleagues who wanted a new machine right away got an older one. But my W520 was and is still doing a great job, so I had the time anyway.

It’s good tho that I took it home – newer hardware and Linux is still something which could cause you headaches. Turned out that the 3.16 kernel in the stable Debian wouldn’t recognize and detect a few items which are much younger than itself, such as the wireless card, or the sound. Some of the installed hardware required a kernel 4.x or higher, so instead of upgrading Debian to “testing” or “unstable”, I decided to put Ubuntu onto it – which is also Debian “unstable”, together with a bit of polish. With that – it has a kernel 4.4 – everything worked out of the proverbial box. Here’s a screenshot I made for my brother yesterday, while typing an email for him on that new machine:

The machine has HDMI, Mini-Display-Port, and Thunderbolt outputs, so today I tried it on our 42″ Panasonic TV, which also worked. Good; my monitor at work has VGA and HDMI inputs, so I only need to order a cable for HDMI. And after adding the IBM ‘Open Client’ layer and copying some files from the old machine to this new one, I’ll be done.

This is a nice one. Should be fun to use it.

Thanks for reading and for viewing, as always.

Update, from Sunday morning:

I finished pre-configuring that new machine. At work, I will have to install the Open Client layer on top of it all, but for now I have 3 operating systems running on it: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and virtualized Windows 7 and 10 environments (both using 2 CPU cores and 8GB of RAM; this machine is powerful enough to even run them all at once – it has 8 cores and 32GB of RAM). Here are a few screenshots plus one I made using my camera:

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running on Lenovo Thinkpad P50

Windows 7 (on Oracle VirtualBox 5) running on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running on Lenovo Thinkpad P50

Windows 10 (on Oracle VirtualBox 5) running on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running on Lenovo Thinkpad P50

Lenovo Thinkpad P50 (running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS) in front of my 24″ monitor (showing Debian 8 “Jessie”)

Again, thanks for viewing/reading.

We have road works at Frankfurt Sossenheim, where I work. This will last at least two weeks and will delay us all, especially in the evenings when we try to get home (in the mornings I’m early enough to avoid the main traffic). This is how it looked today:

Baustelle – Road works

On another note, I’ve tried and converted this image using Darktable 2.01 on Linux, no Olympus Viewer – so no starting of a virtualized Windows instance – and no RawTherapee. Tagging etc. works as expected, and I’ve done no fancy stuff, just basic conversion mostly like the program recommended by itself. Oh, what’s really cool is that you can add geotags quite easily, with searching on a map if your camera doesn’t have built-in GPS already. So this one – on Flickr – will show you where I took it, without anything done in Flickr at all.

Cool stuff. I knew that Darktable is powerful, but never got around to getting used to it. I like this idea of Open Source Photography, done with free (as in speech) tools.

Thanks for viewing.

P.S.: Here’s another one which I took yesterday, and which I “developed” using Darktable (instead of my usual “workflow” with first using OV3 on Windows, and then RawTherapee on Linux):

IBM Frankfurt Sossenheim, 2016

What I like so far about this program, except from the really easy and convenient GPS tagging is that it approximates colours close enough to the Olympus “original” in-camera colours which aren’t super accurate, but very nice. Haven’t played around with own ICC profiles etc. yet; I’m still discovering the many things you can do with this. Darktable even has layers which makes it even more powerful than Lightroom, and you can do selective edits with either brushes and/or these layers, which I didn’t try until now.

What I also like is the very good dynamic range. Ok, we’ve had some dramatic clouds yesterday, and it started to rain short after I was in again, but OV3 (or the in-camera jpgs of Olympus) is a bit more contrasty out of the box, while RawTherapee doesn’t get these colours. So here it gives you some additional headroom, reminds me of photos taken with Nikon cameras which are very good in that regard.

Plus they have a nice manual, so you could go and have a look if you like. No Windows version tho… 😉

What I don’t like is that the program really takes some resources. It makes use of GPU acceleration if you have a compatible card (Nvidia or ATI only, doesn’t work with my onboard Intel graphics). I wouldn’t try this on a machine with less than 8GB of RAM (I have 16GB), and with a quad core processor like mine. And read the manual and save the (very good profiled) denoising until the end – some steps slow down the machine more than others (didn’t do any denoising here).

Again, thanks for reading / viewing.