28 September 2009

Repository for Centralized GTK-based Software (Win32)

It seems my previous attempt is a failure about create single package for graphics apps that doesn't even have a level of integration to be said as suite. It not even suitable as portable apps either...A portable need to be small in installed size to overcome bottleneck in removeable media I/O too. Thus require binary compression such as upx and if possible recompiled with size optimization like -Os / -s or both.

UPX'ed binary tend to have larger outcome in memory usage compared to normal binary right after execution, but thats of course not a problem as with memory management (or just minimize it and restore) both (upx'ed or not) will end up at the same level. In a fast harddisk (rAID 0 for example) the penalty goes with UPX'ed at being 10%-15% slower in startup time.

This time I uploaded some more manageable & portable packages as continuation of previous attempt.

Plan:
I'd to do uniform rebuild of (probably) all dependencies with mingw's optimization flags that I usually used for building Blender but with minimum binary size in mind.

Main dependencies (download this first):
  1. GTK 2.16.5 Runtime including GTKMM, aspell-en dict, dozen themes and some deps (10.8 -> 19.8 Mb)
  2. Python 2.5.4 required by GIMP, Inkscape, MyPaint, Gramps and optionally needed by Gnumeric (7.6 -> 20.0 Mb)
  3. Converter contain external deps such svg2swf, ghostscript and so on.. optionally needed by Gimp & Inkscape
Portable Packages (English only, UPX'ed and lack of docs):
  1. GIMP 2.6.7 + plugins (9.7 -> 19.3 Mb)
    Our proudly raster editing software
  2. Inkscape 0.47  (7.5 -> 22.7 Mb)
    Our proudly vector creation software
  3. Gnumeric 1.9.14*  (2.6 -> 7.0 Mb)
    Sometime you don't need too big+slow+unresponsive OpenOffice Calc, use Gnumeric spreadsheet!
  4. Bluefish 1.3.8 unstable 2.9 -> 5.2 Mb)
    I'm sure this will break the realm of  free web editor for windows, but currently any spawning of external program (like previewing in FireFox) didn't work at all, as gspawn-helper died in the process
  5. Pidgin 2.6.2 + plugins (10.3 -> 12.8 Mb)
    IM anyone?
  6. Nip 2-7.18 (2.3 -> 5.2 Mb)
    A very hardcore image processing software in logical way
  7. Dia 0.97 (1.9 -> 8.0 Mb)
    Our proudly diagramming software
  8. X-Chat 2.8.4 GPL (0.6 -> 0.6 Mb)
    This is GPL version of official x-chat for windows
  9. MyPaint 0.7.1+git* 16/11/2009 (1.9 -> 2.4 Mb)
    Digital Painting oriented software
  10. Homebank 4.0.4  (2.1 -> 3.4 Mb)
    The little brother of the big badass GnuCash
  11. MtPaint 3.31 (0.4 Mb)
    A pixel art / sprite creation oriented software
  12. GIMP Animation Package 2.6 (3.6 -> 54.0 Mb) and Script-Fu pack provided separately due to its contra efficient in distribution/portability/performance aspect
  13. Abiword ? (there is ongoing effort to fallback to GTK-based backend which may bring GOffice integration and other interesting features)
  14. Avidemux 2.5.1 (5.1 -> 9.2 Mb)
    Better than MovieMaker video editor with a lot of modern file format choices
  15. Gramps 3.1.2 (1.6 -> 9.2 Mb)
    Family tree maker
  16. Stardict 3.0.1 with Wordnet (6.6 -> 8.9 Mb) dictionaries
    I can't find any commercial alternative that feature like this old one.
* custom build
GIMP, Inkscape and MyPaint package updated (under progress) here

As usual, prepare an empty folder first, and extract any package there
Execute using provided .cmd files

Now it just more looks like in Linux ehh? smaller and efficient
You might also interested to visit my personal oss collection here

**changelog**
____________
30 November 09
- revert some dlls in GIMP and GTK from UPX's flaw

____________
3 October 09

GIMP
- enabling eps/ps import through ghostscript 8.01

Inkscape
- move out deps to separate converter folder

MyPaint
- updated to 03 October 2009 git with "pen-tilt" fix attempt and use single window interface like Gimp 2.6

Python
- updated missing deps

____________
30 September 09

GIMP
- rename gimp-2.6.exe to gimp.exe and change executables location
- modify default.env, pygimp.interp so gimp can be called by external apps (inkscape)
- remove happy-valley-relief.py (not work?) and add pspi plugins
- removal of several hundreds script-fu plugins and revert to standart to reduce startup time since scm files didn't cached for for next startup

Inkscape

- implement Dia diagram import and Gimp xcf export for windows (previously coded for linux only)
- implement import ps and eps through gpl ghostscript 8.01 which considerably smaller than current 8.7
- implement swf (flash w/o animation) export through svg2swf
- enabling xfig import through xfig2dev

____________
28 September 09
initial upload

25 September 2009

Play GTA IV PC without reinstalling

I had heard someone say that GTA IV can't be played without reinstalling. I did check it with regmon and filemon for any interesting registry injections. These what I found

Apart of Games for Windows Live, registry only slightly modified:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

22 September 2009

Bluefish 1.3.7 (unstable) on Windows

This is huge improvement!
Finally a coder friendly web editor is make its way on Windows platform. Look at the shot below:


On the fly auto-completion, code folding and on-demand spellchecking (F5)

After download it from their homepage. I had recogized a glitch at first glance. The spellcheck doesn't work at all. It reveal that Installer had been missing some aspell files. No problems, I quickly grab inkscape's aspell-0.60 and overwrite bluefish's and now as you can see in above shot...

Another thing... if you run external program that doesn't exist (you'll need to put it on PATH) like tidy in outputbox menu, You will get crashed, instead of friendly "not found" message. So beware


That's my quick review so far... Here is another shots



Numerous web language that Bluefish currently support


regex support

Bluefish have any feature that I expected from code editor. If stable version released, I will surely replace my sluggish resource-hog Komodo-Edit and crippled CodeLobster!

16 September 2009

Favorite Open Source Software Part I

The first post will contain my mosty used OSS. This is however an open source related blog. Making some hint about freeware may ruins the objective. Say comparing Mingw+Codeblock with Visual C++ Express 2008.. hu hu

1. Archiver

Criteria:
- Being reasonably slower to achieve better compression is always acceptable
- Faster and lower memory for  decompression is a must have
- Stable operation under heavy load
- Shell integration
- Support for other major format

7-Zip 9   Learn more


Still in beta phase, 7-Zip by Igor Pavlov slowly but surely become one of most reliable archiver (be it freeware or commercial). Now with support for updating 7z archive, better cancellation under heavy load and new LZMA2 compression method.7-Zip will find its way to replace your favorite archiver and will be embraced in the same league as ubiquitous Zip.

7-Zip is one of few that has numerous support for surprisingly oddball format like shown in the shot above. It also have quirk like manual mutiple decompression for multilevel archive such tar.bz2

Alternatives:
Peazip GUI is... odd
SharpArchiver Nice theme and simple interface, I'll looking forward
KGB Archiver Ever experience instability with it
FreeARC  GUI is...odd



2. Browser

Criteria:
- Flawless page rendering
- Simplicity vs feature ratio
- Efficient memory usage

This time my choice goes to two browser.
One use gecko other one use webkit. huhu that mean no Opera no IE already (they are not OSS anyway)
One is a fork other one is mainstream browser. WTF no firefox then?
One is single process other one is parent-child process. Yeah you know the last one
One is extremely lightweight other one is extremely memory-hog. uhh haven't you noticed that?
One is looks unpolished and odd other one is very sleek and intuitive. Thats the tradeoff
Both are the fastest browser. Yes beating Opera 10 too.
Both support latest web standart. Facebook should displayed flawlessly :)

They are K-MeleonCCF ME 0.096 and Chromium 4



Chromium >>>
<<< K-Meleon










K-MeleonCCF ME is another fork of an already lightweight K-Meleon by Hao Jiang, the other fork is K-Ninja. The fork focusing on making K-Meleon even more lighter while keep update with current standart (Gecko 1.9.1). It missed RSS Reader but add IE tab function. In many interface area there are glitches everywhere and dialogs was mostly unpolished (another chinese typical software). If you don't satisfied, you can wait for K-Meleon 1.6 (Gecko 1.9.1) which soon to be released. K-Meleon project itself is not a fork of Mozilla, mainly its a native win32 interface for gecko thus remove the need of XUL. This also considerably bring incompatibility with Mozilla extensions.

Chromium is a project behind Google Chrome, and an autobuild for Win32 is provided daily here. Not much I could say about this very well known browser.

Alternatives:
Flock  This is better than Firefox itself  IMO
Iceweasel  Another prove that firefox fork is necessary
Seamonkey  I use this exclusively before switch to K-Meleon
Arora  Promising chrome alternative based on QT and Webkit
Firefox  Sometime the most popular is over-rated  
Amaya  I will use it for web development instead
Links?  Q: Do you need text mode?
Lynx?  A: Text mode is good for spider analysis...



3. Text Editor

Criteria:
- FAST, seriously I don't want to wait more than a second for opening text files
- Lean, in case my rig is under heavy-load I don't wish to wait it loaded either
- Built-in Regex
- Good language syntax support and programming purpose feature


Notepad2 4.0 Mod
This is a modified version of original notepad2 (another scintilla based editor by florian ballmer)
Notepad2 bring you most useful feature of Notepad++ at the cost of notepad. No more wait!


















Alternatives:
Notepad ++ Too big, too slow Scintilla based.
SCITE The original Scintilla but GUI need more work. Otherwise love the tab and leave notepad2
JEdit I'm not Java-based software fans



4. Internet Messenger

Criteria:
- Simple / Minimalistic interface
- Low bandwidth consumption, this is for chatting not browsing ehh...
- Multi-protocol


Pidgin 2.6 (formerly GAIM)



While windows version doesn't not support Voice/Video chat yet. Pidgin is getting near to AIO chat apps you ever needed. Me myself has replaced x-chat with it. Some alternative like MirandaIM offer more simpler interface. But none has close the sheer number protocol combined with simple interface pidgin has. Not  to mention its low bandwidth usage when compared to YM.




5. Media Player

Criteria:
For Audio Player:
- Lowest memory/CPU usage as possible cause I will listen to song as much as I work
- Option to hide the interface (e.g as systray) and control it from 100% hotkeys
- Support Ogg and at least one lossless-compressed format like FLAC

For Movie Player:
- Should play most popular format
- Smooth playing, yes I'm talk about seek time too
- Basic video control would be nice



This is somehow too simple audio player but fill all criteria (if you have multimedia keyboard), playlist also faraway from competing Winamp's. The good side, memory (3,5MB) /cpu (mostly 0) usage is one of the lowest of every GUI player I have tried before :) In short: listen and leave it run in backgroud.

Alternatives:
- aTunes Java-based player that gaining popularity. If you don't mind the java-hog thingy this is a great choice that similar to iTunes, use MPlayer as engine, have global hotkeys and many excellent online features which cost (>80MB/>40MB minimized) memory usage.
- wxMusik  Absolutely powerful yet low-resource player that should unset CoolPlayer easily, but interface is somewhat unresponsive. (project seemed terminated)
- Songbird  a popular odd combo, hmm.. what the dev think about it...
- Jukes  Another decent Java-based player, but give me a hardtime finding the volume slider...
- Jajuk  Java apps always has new trick for GUI, but this time its too much for a player
- Zinf  Buggy FreeAmp clone (didn't respond multimedia keyboard event?)




Long before mplayer world of windows was ruled by codec (vfw, acm, dshow, activex etc) package that enable regular movie player to support additional format. For the record I 've experienced the pain ACEs Mega Codec too. Then ffdshow is coming, but all was proven to be no more than a mess and incompatibility. MPC bring a slightly better solution but still have the same backend. So here you go the winner: MPlayer bring all decoder natively inside itself.

Now whats left is selection of GUIs. My choice goes to MPUI-hcb, an updated MPUI with perfected features but still as lightweight.

Alternatives:
none, or maybe SMPlayer & MPlayer



6. Burning Tools


Criteria:
- Decent burning engine, Nero still the best AFAIK
- Feature complete (including format, methods etc)



CDRTFE 1.3.5 (CDRTools Front-End by O.Valencia and O. Kutsche)

It reminds me to X-CD-Roast on linux. A front-end to cdrtools (burning engine by joerg schilling) that bring you the most of it and more (Mode2CDMaker and VCDImager). It can eat and spit (CD and DVD), Audio CDs, XCDs, (S)VCDs and DVD-Video in RAW, TAO or DAO





Filesystem support includes:
ISO9660 up to level 4 (my favorite)
Joliet extension
UDF
Rock-Ridge (Amiga and most Unix)
AFAIK mkisofs did support hfs, you might try it from additional command option from setting dialog

CDRTFE's interface is nowhere like others, its name isn't so. Its really focus on features (which I suggest you to read it by yourself before even try this apps). A good thing you need to know is that CDRTFE use native cygwin emulation of cdrtools, which mean produced ISO or disc could benefit from POSIX.



For example:
- Inside CDRTFE, Filesystem become case sensitive. Yes! cdrtfe.exe is not the same as CDRTfe.exe
- Support hardlink-like handling for duplicated files


Like X-CD-Roast, CDRTFE doesn't offer explorer inside its GUI. Instead a clever solution is done from explorer context menu integration.

Alternatives:
InfraRecorder More polished UI, less powerful, much popular









7. Download Manager


Criteria:
- Support multisource, multipart and accelerated mode
- Able to fully hide itself as systray
- Wide protocol support such as bittorent or able to retrive from youtube or rapidshare
- Scheduler or Bandwidth limiter (like wget) is a good addition

Still stick with IE's download dialog? Even FF and Chrome offer decent download manager. Opera 10 has torrent support too. So why we need another download manager. That would be criteria no.1 that most browser didn't implement it reasonably due to traffic balance. No.2 also not make sense for browser too.


FDM 3
Frankly nowadays dozens of  freeware was comparable to download manager veteran like GetRight, DAP or Mass Downloader. Even, you can't see significant differences between OSS, freeware and shareware. Need another excuse? If you want commercial grade inside OSS thats where FDM shine. FDM memory usage is one of highest among download manager. At <8MB I doubt thats important issue in regard to its complete array of features.

Have been started as freeware and converted as OSS, FDM face almost no competition from original startup OSS Downloader like alternatives below:

wxDownload Fast   Low-resource DM with great feature
widestream DM  Despite its small size, its .NET 3.5 architecture made it resource-hog
True Downloader  One of earliest OSS of its kind and currently no longer active

15 September 2009

Is there a chance for me to switch the linux way?

I have tried many *nix distro since 2001 from the venerable redhat, suse, freebsd, first version of gentoo, plan9, QNX and several oddballs but nothing keep me stayed for more than 2 weeks. Everytime I try to adapt a new software, documentation is mostly poor. GUI also never become consistent solution either, which require reinforcement from shell session to make adjustment, troubleshoot and so on.

Let say someone that pretty dumb about computer (I'll assume atleast he/she is internet-aware) is given Linux as her/his OS. Thats no problem at all, what she/he need is launch a broswer and type url. Same thing for office-people all they need to know is formula, indentation, layout standart and so. They will simply done their work perfectly whatever the OS is. These people category is belong as end-user.

This is exactly how average people moaning why so-called power-user hate to switch platform. Yes thats because we do care about system's internal, how to speedup thing, automate task efficiently and so on that end-user mostly dont care or not notice.

Its common that the more complex a system is the more longer user take to adapt when new major release coming. A simple example: Most user will mostly want updated MyPaint as soon as possible, meanwhile MyPaint developer will hold back as lower as possible PyGTK (higher system) requirement, then PyGTK dev just do the same things to Python (the main dependencies). All will end at platform level (combination of OS and Processor).

Provacating words like "move to linux now" is simply ignorant from my view. Thats the same for "move to vista now". Basically the less dependent (or care) of user to the OS itself will certainly make faster transition to be happened.

Just years later, *nix distro released  (mostly linux-based) evermore. Even Linux kernel (in general not custom one) is subject to bloatness and sluggishness as it evolve. Fortunately many distro like MEPIS AntiX, DragonFlyBSD and Milax (solaris) are care about people like me who crave lightness over bloatness. So will I switch to *Nix? Of course not

Bored of Building Binary

Almost two month since this blog inception, all I do is provide file and files with very few review or tips. So I'm planning on creating list of my favorite OSS as this blog entitled for. But it won't be random absurd list by popularity or by  gathering other so many similar list. No, my list will be my very own list aka absolutely biased review based on my criteria.

Maybe few days later I will issue the list one by one per category per post.

After that, I will published my graphics art gallery... then write a guide about MyPaint, Nginx, NTFS hack, Registries... Start my own OSS project...  Meh, who knows

13 September 2009

Open Source Graphics Suite Portable for Windows 32-bit

OK, I'm tired of waitin. Here is my test-release of Open Source Graphics Suite.
All applications are portable and efficiently share their dependencies.

Packages:

Portable GIMP 2.6.7 + GAP 2.6 + plug-ins + current Docs (Bitmap/Photo Editing and Creation)
Portable Inkscape 0.47 pre2 + PDF manuals (Vector SVG Creation and Editor)
Portable Dia 0.9.7 (Flowchart Creation)
Portable MyPaint 0.7.1 git 08-09-09 layermodes-branch (Digital Painting)
Portable MtPaint 3.31 (Pixel-Art Creation)
Portable RGBPaint 0.8.5 (MS Paint-like tool)
Portable Nip 2 (Hardcore Image Processing based on VIPS and ImageMagick)
Portable Phatch 0.1.5 (Batch Image Processing based on PIL)
Python 2.5.4
GTKmm 2.16 with theme selector
Bonus: GreenShot 0.7 (Powerful yet straight Screen Capture, need .NET 2.0 framework)
What's Not: Localisation, IMO that's big ass redundant!

I have tested it in Windows XP32 and Seven 32

Advantages:

- Space saving, both download size and installed size
- Unified theme for most apps, I have pack a lot of themes inside too
- Save your time for hunting GIMP's plugins and add that to GIMP's startup time :/
- Flexible and updateable, you may modify cmd files your own way and I'm not interested to make it executable loader.
- Python-Fu GIMP is enabled, unlike PortableApps (correct me if I wrong)

Usage:

- Extract file OSGS.7z using WinRAR or 7-Zip to a folder in Flashdisk or Harddisk
- Double-Click your desired command file... Enjoy
- To change Appearance and font, run gtk_theme.cmd and choose the theme you like. check "Apply for all user" and save. All apps should reflect the changes.

Download: updated here

Open Source Graphics Suite (Portable) broken

filetype: 7-zip archive
filesize: 70MB
installed size: 311MB

Troubleshoot:

- In case you want to change directory structure, like rename Userdata folder to your language. You will also need to modify the .cmd file accordingly.
- If some newer package need updated python (e.g. GIMP 2.7 need Python 2.6) add python2.6 there, update cmd file and look for my previous post about GIMP exception.
- This way hopefully I don't need to upload it again once Inkscape 0.47 and upcoming MyPaint released.

10 September 2009

Create your own GIMP Portable with simple batch command

While waiting the final release of Inkscape and upcoming MyPaint. I'm stumbled on few drawbacks of my unified Installer for All-in-One graphics OSS. Such problems are:

1. What if user have python already, should I force them to uninstall the conflicting one?
2. And if I tolerated it. What happen if they have Python Packages that newer or older?
3. What about mutiple different Python? Pythonpath?
4. Same thing for existing GTK Runtime/Devel that might be installed already and so on...

06 September 2009

PyGTK 2.16.0 Win32 Unofficial Build

Looking for PyGTK installer? go here (official)

This page is obsolete!  updated here (complete installer)

Update 14 August 2010:
- Experimental PyGTK 2.21.0 Build

Update 6 July 2010:
-Move webkit, clutter and poppler from this page
-Bundling runtime all in one 
-Add pygtkhtml2, a lightweight html browser which good enough for embedded help viewer

02 September 2009

7-Zip 9.07 beta LZMA2 vs LZMA

Being fully supported through compression method option, lzma2 has the same setting as older LZMA. And its time for some test. I prepare a set of files in which contained a lot of binary, a huge english dictionary plain text, some html, couple of waves and few already compressed file.

The fileset size before compression is 199MB (1822 files)
My System : E2160 Oced at 2,9Ghz; 2GB DDR2-667; rAID0 HHD on XP-32

with LZMA (ultra)
time: 1:41
compressed: 57.4MB

with LZMA2 (ultra)
time: 1:39
compressed: 57.3MB

A very slightly faster and better :D, but it still beta anyway and afterall both beat rar/zip/bz2/gzip by far.

01 September 2009

Arora 0.9, QT4's WebKit based Browser


When I looking for modern low-resource browser, friend at IRC suggest arora. At that times I already check out Firefox 3 fork called Iceweasel 3. Surprisingly both logo are polar bear, heh but no they are made by different developer.

Arora is probably the first well-know WebKit based browser, meaning it has different rendering engine than any current mainstream browser though interface is strikingly similar to Firefox. More it has lower memory usage than mainstream browser except iceweasel (both tied).

Arora also support flash (and Click to Flash feature similar to Opera). In a test arora's rendering is far slower than firefox especially to Chromium and Opera not slower than IE, like shown in below screenshot:



Page rendering of sf.net and slashdot.org in Arora

Iceweasel and Arora use around 50-60MB of memory in my system to render both sites. While Chrome, Firefox and IE climb up to 90-110MB. All in vanilla configuration. The only browser that match both OSS browser is freeware Opera 10.

Futhermore, when browser minimized only arora and opera that dramatically unloaded from memory become just several MB. IE and Chromium unload its parent process while child (each tab) process remain the same. On the other hand, Mozilla-based don't reduced at all.

Galeon based browser K-Meleon is currently still the most efficient browser for windows.