GIMPShop and Alien

First of all, thanks to Johnny for pointing this out. Here's his e-mail:

"I was listening to Leo Laporte on the radio this morning. A caller was talking about Photoshop and The Gimp. Anyway, Leo mentioned The Gimp and Gimpshop. I guess Gimpshop is a hack to The Gimp to make the menus look and work like Photoshop. Of course, I thought of you! Have you heard of this? Here's the link"

Naturally I had to give it a shot.

Caveat: I don't know Photoshop from my ass. I (used to) use Paintshop Pro. I'm not sure exactly how much Gimpshop compares to Photoshop interface-wise.

Hardcore Linux folks may be annoyed to learn that I don't like The Gimp (until they realize that my opinion shouldn't matter to them). Despite the power I keep hearing it has, I can't get past the interface enough to do more than fiddle around with it a bit. So I figured I'd try this Gimpshop thing out to see if it would change my mind.

If you use Ubuntu, or any other Debian-based Linux, you'll notice that Gimpshop isn't in the repositories, so you'll have to install it at the command line. You'll also find that the only two official distributions are source code or an RPM package. I'm not at the stage where I'm comfortable compiling from source yet, so I decided to fiddle with the RPM instead.

You can install many RPMs in Debian/Ubuntu/Whatever using the rpm utility available in the repositories, but you probably shouldn't. That's beause apt/aptitude/dpkg/whatever-you-use won't know about it, and ideally you want these programs to know about everything on your machine so they can fix things when something goes wrong.

Instead of using the rpm utility you can use Alien to convert the Gimpshop.RPM file to a Gimpshop.DEB file. Alien is available in the repositories. It doesn't always work out of the box but it's worth having around. In this case, it worked fine.

So go install Alien, then download the RPM file from freshmeat here.

Now go to your download directory and do this:

alien -k PACKAGENAME.RPM

(You may have to precede that command with "sudo" on your system.) It'll churn for a while and then, if all goes well, tell you it's generated a .deb package. You can install (and uninstall) this package using dpkg.

Type this to install it:

sudo dpkg -i PACKAGENAME.DEB

Note that Gimpshop is currently based on GIMP 2.2.4, so it may downgrade your more recent version. Your choice.

That's it. You're done. Fire up The GIMP and see if it acts a bit more like Photoshop. Some folks swear by it. I can't really tell the difference but, like I said, I don't know Photoshop very well. I'll keep it around, though, giving it a chance to grow on me.

Either way, even if I were still using Windows and PSP, I don't photoshop much these days. My monitor is slowly dying, getting to the point that I can't see details I know I added to certain chops a year ago.

Thanks for thinking of me, though. :D