नेय्मलस Blog

Martin Renold's "MyPaint" is one of the best thing to happen on Linux and Opensource in general. From a long time, there was no dedicated painting application on linux that can match the power of OpenOffice, Firefox, Blender, Ardour, and Gimp. Krita OK. but it never worked out of the box and usually when it did, you had to compile the whole OS based of KDE to get it to work. But once it did, it was a beauty.

Recently we have seen a lot of effort by independent developers to bring the flow and feel of paint media to the available applications. Gimp painter is such an example. But Gimp is much more then a painting canvas, it is a photo retouching application primarily, though it can be extended and has been extended to do much more than that. On the other hand MyPaint is a minimalist's dream. Like Wings3d, it hides its real power and in return gifts you the whole of your monitor's real estate for your simple joy and pleasure of painting.

To put it simply, MyPaint is a raster based paint engine that aims to simulate real world paint media and pencils, and to achieve this, it provides a fully customizable dynamic brush (painting and brushing engine) which can be tweaked to your hearts content. Now, Inspite of all its technical achievements, It is in fact surprisingly simple and easy to use. So easy that even my cousins 3 years old daughter was painting from the word go. (be careful though with your stylus as they can easily be damaged by kids and the kids in return can easily hurt themselves with it. so stay close to them.)

Also please note that MyPaint does not seek to replace Gimp. But rather works in conjunction with and in return compliments its power and capability's. As you work in it, you will find yourself moving between the two. Allright, time to compile your own MyPaint.

Compiling MyPaint:

Compiling MyPaint is just like typing 123. Just follow these steps and you will see how easy it is to compile it from the daily builds, so that you are always on that cutting edge of development. Compiling daily builds also makes you a collaborator in one sense as you test drive the latest developers copy and if you discover any bugs, you submit a bug report which in return solidifies and strengthens the software.

Step 1: Install the dependency's or just go here: Compiling Blender2.5 and simply copy and paste all of them. (Its a lot to go by even though 'mypaint' only needs a few. But as we will be compiling a whole bunch of advanced multimedia software's, I have gathered all of them together for easy one time install. Later we will compile the whole enterprise class OS with rt kernel all built ground up for speed and performance.) To warn you, I don't have a technical background and don't know any programming, not a bit of it, and so, if I can do it, so can you.

Step 2: Now, fire up the terminal and create a directory "MyPaint" by typing: mkdir MyPaint. Navigate to the just created folder by typing: cd MyPaint.

Step3: Type the following in the terminal to download the latest builds by typing:

git clone git://gitorious.org/mypaint/mypaint.git

Step4: Navigate to the folder mypaint by typing: cd mypaint and type: scons to start the compilation process.

This should create the necessary files needed to run MyPaint. Infact you can now run this beauty by simply typing ./mypaint in the terminal and it should blossom right in front of your eyes, demanding, that you start pouring your dreams instantly onto the canvas and have it all magically transformed into reality by the spirit of your creativity.

You can now create a launcher to run the program from its default compiled location and run it from there.

To install do the following.

sudo scons prefix=/usr/local install

Now you should get an icon/link in your Application/Graphics menu.

You can also run it by typing mypaint in the terminal or create a launcher on your desktop or panel for quick start.

That's it, enjoy painting :)