[?] [photo] FreeBSD as photographers workstation. Laptop choice.

nekoexmachina

nekoexmachina

Hi forums!
Anyone here uses FreeBSD as photographers workstation? What hardware do you use?

I'm currently in search of laptop for my journeys and, probably, home working with photos too.
What is requested for it:

1) good color reproduction (? google translate, do not know adequate word)
The main point. Cause photos redacted on my home PC have coloring errors, e.g. things I see on monitor are not same with printing photos. After ~5 times mucking up the prints I've managed to see what are the differencies with actual colors and my monitor color reproduction, but that is very, very unhandy, and for another monitor I'll have another differencies, which is even more bad.

2) fast enough harddrive (probably SSD would be a win) plus proccessor, for real-time loading of photos in rawstudio

First editing goes in rawstudio to filter up the good photos and throw out the bad, then main editing is in GIMP, if needed of course. RawStudio takes like ~5-10 seconds to load a photo with my desktop PC. That is not a stopper, but kind of annoying.

Actually I can not understand what is the main thin point there, cause there is 80MB/s SATA hard-drive plus 2.6GHz Athlon proccessor (Athlon x4 620), plus 8GB mem on top of of course 64bit FreeBSD. Photos are 10-25 megs (NEF Raw 12MPx). Some days in journeys/cool events/etc it takes about a 1k photos/day, which is very annoying to sort with delays. Any suggestions here?

3) Good working WiFi.
I used to use 1 laptop with FreeBSD: HP530. In there, there was a 'working' device for WiFi, but in fact it always was somehow kludgy (from time to time I've needed to reconnect for net to work again, plus wifi hardware button did not work) and not opensource (via ndis).

Also, I'm using Nikon D90 cam and I can not get it working in PTP mode. Anyone succeded with it on any Nikons D* cam in FreeBSD? With previous D1X it was also no success. Cardreader is not a problem of course, but PTP support would be nice. Could not give dmesg traceback right now, will be here ASAP.

Could anyone recommend some good device?
 
Probably not what you want to hear but I would suggest buying a Macbook Pro.
 
SirDice, I've thought of it, but I dislike Mac OS UI a lot. Have a macbook on work for testing purposes: every time I use it it creeps me out.

Edit: if you mean using MacBook with FreeBSD on top of it its kind of OK but a question is working devices. I've used to use G3 (PowerPC) iBook with FreeBSD for couple of days and WiFi with Apple's card did not work at all.
 
nekoexmachina said:
SirDice, I've thought of it, but I dislike Mac OS UI a lot. Have a macbook on work for testing purposes: every time I use it it creeps me out.

Edit: if you mean using MacBook with FreeBSD on top of it its kind of OK but a question is working devices. I've used to use G3 (PowerPC) iBook with FreeBSD for couple of days and WiFi with Apple's card did not work at all.
Click to expand...

You should get MacBook Pro with 15 inch retina display and GeForce GT 650M option, it comes with SSDs already soldered to motherboard. And drop a Linux on it (it will need some dirty hacks though for it to work) if you want to get good camera support or leave native OSX and get used to the interface (for best experience and performance). I would not recommend putting FreeBSD there as it will refuse to even boot up, but like most things its probably also hackable.
 
I would suggest sticking to OS-X as pretty much everybody in the photography and graphics business uses Macs.
 
Install /usr/ports/graphics/gphoto2
Plugin the usb to your d90. Note the onscreen messages and/or new ugen in /dev.
Code: 
(turn on the camera)
gphoto2 --list-ports
gphoto2 --port /dev/ugen3.[something] --shell # could be any of the many ugen*
(With luck you'll be at #gphoto2# or something)
ls
cd DCIM (deeper in the structure til the directory with photos or AVI)
(The cd ... may not work sometimes until you erase the trailing backslash or vice versa)
get [something].JPG  # Haven't done it in a while, so I don't remember the
exact commands... but the pictures/avi should be copied to the place from where
you started [FILE]gphoto2[/FILE] in shell mode. (Also, may not work unless you 
erase the trailing backslash, I don't remember precisely).
#gphoto2#  exit # or whatever.  It probably has a 'help' or '?' in shell mode.
(Unsure if that is PTP mode or not).
Not exact instructions because one or two steps could be out of order or a typo...
BTW one can do this in one xterm, and in another review the JPG as they appear locally, saving time in the long run.
 
The term you are looking for in post #1 is probably "color calibration". AFAIK, that is still not really available in FreeBSD, and difficult with open source in general.

Running FreeBSD as a VM on a Windows notebook is not perfect, but gives more choice than the Mac. The other way around, with Windows in the VM, might be workable with USB pass-through for color calibration devices.

For wireless, Atheros AR9280. Since that is probably not what will be included, plan on replacing the mini-PCIe card. That eliminates Lenovo and HP notebooks, which only allow certain branded cards. I'd avoid Toshiba, too. That leaves mostly Acer and Dell. Dell might actually have a notebook with an IPS LCD panel, although they will call it something else.
 
The other way around, with Windows in the VM, might be workable with USB pass-through for color calibration devices.
Click to expand...
Is it one-time hardware setting? E.g., what I mean, if I will buy Windows laptop, calibrate colors with calibration device, then install FBSD, would it work OK?
 
Possibly, by copying the color calibration files from Windows to FreeBSD. That assumes those files would be in a compatible format that could be used by image editing and printing software running on FreeBSD... and the existence of such software. GIMP 2.8 *might* have that ability. No idea on Gutenprint.

Dual boot for direct hardware access would probably be a good idea, even with Windows also in a VM.
 
If you look beyond the rather dumbed down UI of OS X (is windows UI really any better? :p ) it's actually a wonderful OS. For me it's like best of the both worlds. It's close enough to a real UNIX and has enough support from big software vendors.
 
nekoexmachina said:
Is it one-time hardware setting? E.g., what I mean, if I will buy Windows laptop, calibrate colors with calibration device, then install FBSD, would it work OK?
Click to expand...
No, because X won't read windows' calibration setting file. KDE 3 has (had?) built-in calibration soft (I don't know about KDE 4.), but, to make it permanent, you have to manually type the calibration result into xorg.conf. Also, you need to calibrate printer (set default colour balance, etc).
 
Windows (possibly running Linux or FreeBSD as a VM for some tasks) or a Macbook would be a better choice for a laptop-based photographic workstation.

There are a few Mac specific applications (not all open source) and Windows specific applications (not all open source) which might cause you to lean one way or another. Some folks swear by certain RAW conversion apps and make their hardware choice based on that.

Two of the very few non open source applications I use are Lightroom and PhotoShop / CS Suite from Adobe; I do a lot of editing in Lightroom these days and very little in PS.

Going Windows or Mac (and even many Linux distributions) will give you, on a laptop, a much better experience typically than going native FreeBSD. By this I mostly mean that working suspend and resume are important for me when on the road and to date my laptop (a common ThinkPad model) just isn't well supported in that regard by FreeBSD.
 
is windows UI really any better?
Click to expand...
actually there is no such thing as a 'better UI'. There is a 'less kludgy UI', 'less non-comfortable UI' and 'less idiotic UI'. IMO :)
It's close enough to a real UNIX and has enough support from big software vendors.
Click to expand...
And actually thats a good point of Mac OS X.

I've tried out installing it on a laptop this weekend, and well its pretty OK. Probably the thing creeping me out at work was our software, not UI overall :)
However, will buy macbook asap, but for now its lenovo plus fbsd (the setup i've tried out in the beginning of the thread).
Thx all.
 
neko,
It is probably worth noting that many MacBooks run FreeBSD well and are capable of dual-booting, if you want some of the software and support of a Mac but are still more comfortable in Unix. GIMP is capable of a lot, and gphoto2 is not bad if you like to script things like photo retrieval from a camera, but these guys are right that in general, MacOS/X is simply made for photographic/audio/video work. It won't cost money to trygrabbing and manipulating photos using gphoto2 and GIMP btu it could take quite a bit of time to get the results you are looking for. good luck!
 
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