Me morphing into my brother Sam.

Just a quick post to show what can be made in around 10 minutes with a nifty little java morphing application called Javamorph and of course my favourite image editor gimp.

The Javamorph project can be found at Google Code or if you’re lucky enough to use Ubuntu it’s in your repositories so you can just apt-get it. I think it’s in the Debian Squeeze repos too.

The project homepage is worth checking out for a brief overview of how the program works and a link to a very informative pdf that explains all.

My very quick and dirty example shows me turning into my youngest brother and back again. Sorry Sam.

As you can hopefully see from the image below all you basically need to do is match up the mesh points with certain areas of each face, eyes, hair, nose etc.  Once you’ve done this javamorph will do the rest of the work.

What javamorph creates is a series of images (jpegs) stored in the output folder after you have run a ‘morph’. These images show the progression from one state to another. To make that into a single animation file (in this case an animated gif) you need Gimp and importantly it’s extra package/plugin gimp-gap. So if you’ve not got these the quickest remedy is:

sudo apt-get install gimp gimp-gap

While you’re adding this great program you might also want to take the time to install gimp-data-extras to add some more brushes, palettes and gradients to your collection. You never can have enough.

So, once you’ve made your morph fire up gimp and head straight to the file menu where there is a handy entry titled Open as layers. With this you can import all your individual images as layers on the image in one command – just highlight all your images with your mouse or ctrl + a.

As you can see we now have as many layers as we do images. Why you might ask? Well because this is how the gimp animation package works – each layer is effectively a a frame in our animation. Obviously at this point you could tinker with the images to your hearts content, perhaps changing the colours or adding in some funky fades and gradients to spice things up a bit. This is just a quick and dirty tutorial though so I’ll leave the creativity to you!

So.. back to the gimp. My morph was made up of 20 images so I have that many layers. However, this animated gif will be used on a loop. That means that (if left as it is now) I’d get a nice fade to one face then suddenly straight back to the original. I don’t like that so I import the same pictures again (still using open as layers) and rearrange their order in the layers list so that one fades seamlessly to the other. Not sure that there is a quick way to do this so be prepared to be clicking the move up and move down buttons a good few times.

When you’re happy with it – you’re ready to save. Before making the gif it’s not a bad idea to save it as an xcf first. The last thing you want to have to do is arrange all those layers again! So once you’ve done that click Save as this time and change the .xcf to .gif. Once you’ve done this the export wizard will fire up. Initially it will suggest flattening the image but you don’t want that so select Save as Animation. The next popup allows you to tweak the speed between frames. The best bet really is to leave it at the default 100 initially, see what the saved gif looks like. From that you’ve a far better idea of whether to speed it up or slow it down.

Well done – you just made your first javamorph!

This was all accomplished in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha4 (technically now that’s 10.04 RC .) To achieve the same in Windows you’d need gimp-win.

Inspired (if that’s really the right word) by all this new Ubuntu artwork I decided to have a little go at creating a new wallpaper. As I said in my last post I like brown, it’s smooth, sexy and natural. So, after a little tinkering with an old photo of my Bonsai tree – ‘Gemmell’ – I created this.

It’s now the default wallpaper on my desktop: could it be yours?

If anyone does like it I’ll upload the (somewhat mammoth sized) gimp xcf file so anyone can play with the colours or whatever they wish.

Currently the chatter surrounding Ubuntu is obviously focused on its next upcoming release 10.04 Lucid Lynx. However, most blog posts and news articles are all talking about the new artwork rather than any technological advances. Discussion (as ever with Ubuntu users and critics alike) seems to focus almost solely on colour. Yes that’s right. I said colour. This release will bring about quite a few changes in not only the colour scheme of the default desktop, it’s wallpaper and themes but also the ubuntu website, online shop, documentation cd covers (just mockups currently) and more besides. Which is nice. But how important is it?

The key word that so many people seem to miss here is default. It’s what the desktop arrives on your computer looking like after a fresh install or while trying out the livecd. I would happily agree that first impressions do mean a lot. Having a slick polished-looking desktop is seldom a bad thing. However, it really is the easiest thing to change whether you’ve never used Ubuntu or Linux before or you are a hoary old hedgehog like me.

What gets my goat is the extent to which the debate surrounding this tiny aspect of the OS takes such focus. The default theme released with Ubuntu has become more polished with each release but it never looked bad. As much as so many bemoan the brown, it made Ubuntu as successful as it has been. No other popular distro used quite such a distinctive and memorable scheme – most default to blues or greens and look entirely unexceptional. The proposed new colours, aubergine being amongst them (fantastic colour, shame about the taste) will hopefully still remain fairly unique to Ubuntu but time will tell.

If I were to point you in the direction of omgubuntu.co.uk and their recent post about the new wallpaper (thanks for the link mesanna!) you need only scroll down the page a few hundred lines to see all the same old arguements coming out about OS aesthetics (obviously being linked to anything even remotely OSX related as often as possible – grr macs..) Why is it impossible to create a nice looking system without being accused of stealing elements of its design from commercial alternatives? Sometimes there genuinely are only a few ways of accomplishing a particular UI successfully and once the best way has been tried and tested enough it is adopted. This is not theft. This is common sense.

Anyway.. what I’m slowly getting round to saying is that yes, re-style your site’s look, give the documentation a face-lift even create more themes and wallpapers. But don’t expect to be able to create a set of themes and wallpapers that will capture the hearts and minds of everyone. It can’t be done.

In my opinion, rather than spending all this time on the look of the thing just make is as obvious as is humanly possible that you can change how everything looks. Perhaps a notification bubble at boot with the words “You can change how I look! Click here to choose a style and find out more”. Shouldn’t be hard right? I’m thinking of adding a filter in firefox for the words “ubuntu + brown + ugly” I’m that tired of reading about this. Proof can be found again by looking at the post linked above and skimming through the comments. I will leave you with one comment which made me laugh, not because it’s right or bold or clever but because it is so fantastically idiotic.

are you serious? What the hell is wrong with ubuntu. I mean, I had a little sympathy for the whole brown thing, but honestly, you should have known everyone hates brown. Ask any girl with brown eyes and they go “eww! they look like poop!”

So, to further expand on your theory, do girls with blue eyes hate Fedora? Green eyes can’t stand openSUSE? Is this something limited only to the female of the species? Thank you Zach for sharing and bringing a smile back to my face!

Unfortunately, Windows Update doesn’t like this, specifically when it comes to installing service packs. I actually want service pack 2 for my laptop as it brings in better support for my BlueRay drive. What I need is to find a way to make my Linux and Windows installations more cosy with one another.

The way to do this is to give the Windows  partition the boot flag, booting its manager and selecting either Windows or Linux from there. Otherwise when the Vista update scans the boot manager it finds grub and gets, quite rightly I suppose, a little confused.

To setup your multiboot computer to get around this, read my tutorial.

September 9th, 2009 brought with it the third release of Moon OS codename Makara. It’s been on my periphery for a while now, seen in a similar vein to Elive but instead Moon OS presents itself as an installable OS rather than Elive, which I’ve alway found to be appealing if a little unpredictable. According to the website it’s powered by Ubuntu but I see a definite minty hand in how it’s laid out, certainly the grub gfx boot.

One of the stand out things I take from the website, screenshots and now I’ve booted from the cd the actual system is quite how good looking it is. Not too pretty, not too slick but slim and salubrious. I must admit I like the green. Having been an Ubuntu man for some time I’ve become used to Browns and oranges, a hint of red perhaps but mainly earthy colours on my Desktop. Green seems like a sensible progression and although I’ve never liked the green of OpenSUSE, Moon OS has it spot on.

But I digress, lets see some screenshots shall we?

As you can see, it’s a very nice looking initial desktop. I love that E17 can create fantastic effects without 3d capability. It means you get a beautiful desktop on all but the most modest computer specifications. Although I don’t have one.. yet, it would be very interesting to see a netbook remix of this distro.

One thing (and it’s really only a very small thing) is that, as the third screenshot above illustrates, Moon OS have created a branded google search homepage. Unfortunately I find it to be hideous. In fairness I think this may be due more to Enlightenments’ otherwise eye-pleasing surroundings creating such a contrast. It needs to be simpler.

While I’m running live I like to put a desktop through it’s paces a little to see how it deals with typical day to day activities. Running live is obviously going to be slower than an installation and won’t benefit from some binary hardware drivers (my Nvdia graphics card in this instance) but stability is none-the-less put to the test. Large files transfers can be tricky sometimes so moving around 10gb from one hard drive to another gives me an indication of how it will perform installed. Happily Moon OS performed perfectly and quickly. Firefox loads in a reasonable time, such that I know it will quite literally fire up; as do the gimp, exaile and pidgin. I will be looking into exaile in some detail as I’m usually a rhythmbox or banshee user. During the test enlightenment did not segfault once. Something I have experienced with Elive before; including the very mac-looking warning stating that this is bad and something has gone wrong.

The Ubuntu Jaunty origins mean that the newer notification system is also active in Moon OS and fits in rather well with the desktop appearance. After booting up I see, out of the corner of my eye, that I’m connected to the internet. It’s just a little touch but it’s nice to be notified of things in such a way.

Up next I will install Moon OS and report back with more of my findings.

For now, the hour is late and so I bid all goodnight.