A Beginners Guide to Sketchbook Express

By | April 4, 2011 | 10 Comments

sketchbook-express-mainLet’s be honest. When we think about free drawing image programs, two things come to mind: the free options that are too basic to be of much use and the professional grade tools that are just too expensive or too complex to be practical for the day to day use (I am looking at you, Photoshop and GIMP).

So, what kind of software would be best for you, if you want the freedom to free draw without too much complexity?

One option is a piece of free software, called Sketchbook Express. This software provides the user with a set of basic professional-grade tools and brushes to allow the user to make images that will be suitable for a variety of applications, including desktop publishing.
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Solving the “Can’t boot from Ubuntu 9.10 LiveCD, Showing Black Screen” Issue

By | December 29, 2009 |

black holeUbuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala was released two months ago. Until last week, I have not been able to get it running on my computer. Whenever I boot up from the LiveCD, it will load up a black screen and remain there. There is no chance of me getting into the desktop. The same incident occurred for the upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic via the Update Manager. There seems to be some conflicts between the Karmic kernel and the Intel video driver that I am using. After some googling around, I realize that many people are having this problem as well and it occurs mainly for Intel drivers.

To solve this issue, the trick is actually very simple (though it took me two months to find out). Simply append “nomodeset” to the grub entry. Here’s the whole procedure.

(Note: The following procedure only applies to those who have Intel driver and have the black screen issue. Do not follow this tutorial if you do not have the issue. You are asking for trouble.)
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Two ways to Edit Multiple Photos with digiKam

By | December 21, 2009 |

Digikam logodigiKam is a powerful and complete photo management tool for KDE. Among its many features is the ability to run batch processes, thanks to the Kipi plugin set, which is also used in other KDE software like Gwenview. With a few simple clicks, users can manipulate multiple photos simultaneously, without having to remember long command line strings or taking countless hours to edit each file.

digiKam can perform the following batch tasks:

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