Notices

I have done a basic recompile of GraphicsMagick. It is available in the Extras repository. I was actually looking to install ImageMagick, but the version created by Anidel is missing. So I decided to try my hand at building GraphicsMagick instead.

GraphicsMagick is a fork of ImageMagick, but does pretty much the same thing. The biggest difference is that ImageMagick has a lot of small binaries (e.g. convert, identify, display, etc.) while GraphicsMagick has one binary (gm) which takes a parameter as to what you actually want to do (e.g. gm convert -resize 640x480 pict.png pict.jpg).

This is a very basic recompile. The command line tools should work as expected. I removed all of the installed documentation (5MB!) so you'll have to look online for the command line options.

I have provided an applications icon which launches "gm display", a sort of GUI for GraphicsMagick. However since it is a standard X11 program (NOT hildonized), there are several problems. First, you will need a hardware keyboard or xkbd to enter text into textboxes. Second, there is no icon for the running application, so don't minimize it! It is difficult to get it back. Third, the popup windows are stuck unless you have hacked matchbox to allow for movable windows (i.e. DIALOGMODE=free). You can also download the hacked version of the matchbox-window-manager to have the free moving windows centered on the screen.

Here's how I did it.
Reboot the tablet to see the changes.

My main goal was to get the command line utilities working, so I didn't spend a lot of time testing the "gm display" GUI. I used my own scratchbox setup to compile for gregale and bora, and I used the autobuilder for chinook and diablo.

At last! Every now and then I need an application to do some kind of image manipulation on pictures before I upload them to my blog. I'm fine with command line programs and although I don't know gm yet, I'm sure I'll know basic operations by heart in no time.

Thank you!

This is just what I need. I normally use imagemagick on a laptop to reduce/rotate images before posting to flickr over GPRS. My set of convert commands works fine with this - except that it doesn't recognise -strip (to remove metadata) - which I can live with.

Thanks.

Dave

Update!

I have compiled GraphicsMagick for gregale and bora using my scratchbox environment. They should be available via the "extras" repository soon.

However, I have not had a chance to test either distribution, so I would really appreciate if someone could install and verify that they actually work. (I had to do some weird stuff to get it to compile in my gregale scratchbox, so I don't know if it will even run.) Thanks for your help!

Just a warning folks... the tablet's processor isn't very powerful, so you might be surprised at how long it takes to do operations on pictures, especially large ones.

As a followup, I tested both gregale and bora distributions on my 770, and they seemed to work just fine. I only tested the basic "gm convert", "gm identify", and "gm display" commands, so there might be other issues. Please let me know if you find any problems.

And qole is right in saying that working with large images is very time-consuming. But the same was true with ImageMagick.

Help please. After installing the chinook binary, all my applcation menu icons disappeared. I did a but they didn't come back. What to do next? :-(
In the meantime, I'm going to examine the post-install script, where the culprit might be.

EDIT: my fault, don't mind. My rootfs is full ;-(

As root;

This definitely has to go into the wiki. And, also, this prompted me to do a complete rootfs backup Thanks, Faheem, a lot

hmm, now if there was a way to make that menu move of to the side, or share screen space with the main window rather then sit on top of it...