Sunday, August 23, 2009

Gimp


Gimp is a free image manipulation program. Think Photoshop for cheapos. Photoshop for cheapos that don't want to Torrent Photoshop. It's a great and very powerful program that does more than most people would ever need from image editing software.

Tonight I tried to install the latest version on OSX Leopard for the kids. This was not easy.

Not only do you have to enable Gimp as an application that is allowed, you also have to install and allow X11. X11 is a free program that is on your Leopard install disk. It is not normally installed with OSX, but is easy enough to install with your original disk.

If that were all it would be okay.

The other steps involved are these:
Open Gimp on the administrator account. Make sure it installed correctly.

Next Open Parental Controls and allow the application for the kids. I have two in my list.
Also make sure to allow X11 (under Utilities)
The last step is the hardest.

Open Gimp on the kid's account.

Sounds easy, however, due to the fact that Gimp is ported to OSX from other platforms, it has about 50 different applications that need to be allowed for the kids. These do not show up in parental controls for whatever reason. So they must be allowed individually. This means

Open Gimp.
Allow whatever application it needs to use (gimp-helper, set-fontsize, etc)
Close Gimp (and possibly X11)
Repeat.

Eventually it will work. And it is worth it! The kids can create some amazing things with Gimp. It just takes some parental patience in the beginning.

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