Studio Girin at Libre Graphics Meeting 2013

Libre Graphics Meeting 2013

Studio Girin will be present at Libre Graphics Meeting 2013, an international meeting gathering developers, builders and users of Free, Open Source and Open Hardware projects for Graphics. This year, it will happen in Madrid, Spain, from the 10th to the 14th of April, with an emphasis on Future Tools.

The meeting will have teams from most known small and big graphics projects in Free Software and Open Hardware world: Synfig, GIMP, FontForge, Krita, LibreOffice, Inkscape, MyPaint, Apertus, and so on. Whatever you do: designer, drawer, film maker or animator, you should get a fit there!

And us? Well, Thursday the 11th, Studio Girin will host a 2-hour workshop from 14h30 to 16h30, which we called “Libre Media’s creation workflow: sharing session“.
As the title implies, this is entirely about sharing knowledge and experience — not just ours, but yours too! — and learning from each other. Because we felt this was the best way to learn actually.

Hope to see you all soon!

Firefox Flicks promotional movie: Interview with the Red Panda

Some people may remember, Studio Girin participated last year to the Firefox Flicks 2012 contest. And we won a first place in New Technology category, section “Asia, Africa, Oceania”.

Well this year we decided not to participate officially. But Mozilla asked us if we wanted to make a small promotional movie for them, to promote this year’s contest. Other winners had interviews of their own that Mozilla edited, so we decided that would be cool to have an interview of Firefox. Because he was our “super-hero” in our 2012’s submission, and also because after all, we do animation movies! So let’s do a Firefox Interview!

To have a look at it, you can either go to the Firefox Flicks 2013 homepage, and you’ll find our video with the name “Girin Studio, Firefox and You” (the name of our 2012 submission, the new movie being called “Interview with a Red Panda“), or directly in Mozilla official Vimeo page. that we also embedded below:

Flicks 2012 Winners: “Firefox and You” from firefoxflicks on Vimeo.

One important point to note about this video is that it has been made fully with Free Software. From the Operating System (Linux), to the software (GIMP, Blender, Ardour, etc.), though Mozilla did minor edits on the finale version and I don’t know what they used, so I can’t promess an absolutely full Free Software stack actually, but at least on our side.

I will write later a postmortem with more details on our process, and you’ll even be able to download our raw files! (GIMP’s XCF files, .blend files, etc.) if you wish.

Note: even though the Vimeo page says that the video is in CC-by-nc-sa, this is a small typo-mistake. We asked Mozilla to release in CC-by-sa and they were obviously OK with it. So feel free to use it, spread it, modify it and do whatever you wish to do with it. Just keep our names in your own creation. 🙂

First contributions of Studio Girin in GIMP are live!

A few days ago, the 5th of February 2013, GIMP 2.8.4 has been released. So what’s the fuss? That’s a minor version, no new feature, nothing that already existed before. This is only a stable release, with bug fixes (which is already good).

But for us, at Studio Girin, this is still a small but nice milestone: this is indeed the released first version with code contribution from Studio Girin!
You will see my name (Jehan) in the release announcement
As I said, our contributions are only bug fixes for now (including fixing a crash case case). But this is a start. We have already a few more fixes and features in the development branch for what will be the next major version (GIMP 2.10), and more coming up.
Note also that it is a little unfair to see only my name over there. I have worked closely with Aryeom. Basically our goal is to adapt our tools to professional usage. And she helps me by telling me all the problems she encounters, and what could be better. And that’s something already! Others just complain…

We are proud to be a small part in a great software used by so many people around. And we just wanted to say it. 🙂

Doctor Marmot fixes Bugs.
Doctor Marmot fixes Bugs.

Update of Mageia with Intuos5 support!

At Studio Girin’s, we use the GNU/Linux distribution Mageia. Though I have a Wacom Bamboo obviously supported, Aryeom uses a brand new Wacom Intuos 5. This particular family of graphical tablets has been available since March 2012 without official Linux support. So we helped to bring it in Mageia, and you can get it today: update your Mageia 2, and have your Intuos5 tablet finally working!

"It is alive", thinks the Marmot
Doctor Marmot-stein re-animating a graphical tablet…

That’s the core of the news. Read below for a retrospective of how this support got into Linux, and how Studio Girin has contributed at its modest level to bring it to Mageia users in particular. This gives a small insight on how works Free, Libre and OpenSource Software (FLOSS), if you were wondering.
Note: some parts may be a little technical.
Continue reading “Update of Mageia with Intuos5 support!”